exchemist

I would assume any half-decent robot would be able to clean itself, or at least be provided with a cleaning apparatus to do the job, without the need for laborious human intervention which would defeat the labour-saving objective of the robot.

In that unlikely eventuality, there would need to be a different economic regime, in which people were paid enough to support themselves from taxation levied on the businesses that operated the robots. Political parties would see the opportunity to get elected on such policies.

Fear of the effects of automation on existing jobs is hardly a new phenomenon in history, cf. The Luddites. Every previous wave of automation has led to new jobs appearing to replace those that were lost. So I'm sceptical that IT-driven automation will lead to what you term "a jobless, cashless proletariat". But previous waves of automation and other causes of radical changes in employment pattern, such as deindustrialisation, can certainly leave people behind with the wrong skills, and/or in the wrong places, to benefit from future opportunities. We've learnt (or I hope at least we've learnt) that the resulting social dislocation needs to be managed, not just left to blind market forces. Reskilling programmes and an active industrial policy, run at regional level, seem to be needed.

Good idea. While they are at it, the vignette ads that they managed to suppress a few months ago have returned. (I’ve now got sufficiently fed up that I’ve installed Adblock Plus, which seems to get rid of them, but for those without it must be annoying. I’m running Safari on Apple Mac.)

Well some hormone levels are influenced by the brain. I’d look at that rather than protein production per se. Hormones can affect a lot of processes in the body.

The brain has nothing to do with it. If a brain were needed, no organism would ever develop from the egg - and there would be no plants. Just think about it for a moment.

Haven’t you already done this?

Er, what argument do you wish to make on this forum, then?

Thanks. Could you tell us the name of your organisation? (Sorry to be pedantic but one does not want to click on unknown links, for fear of malware etc.)

Who is "we", please?

The other error is to think there is a fixed amount of R&D capacity, which can be directed towards one area rather than another. There are different groups with different research interests and you can’t just stop one of them totally without permanently losing your expertise in that area. So it can't be just turned on and off like a tap. Fusion scientists can’t just switch to working on batteries, at the behest of some government funding agency. Another point is that the energy transition involves sailing in uncharted waters: we don’t know what surprises and obstacles may appear. It would be foolish to bet everything on one technology at this point. I’m a bit of a fusion sceptic myself, but I can see the need to keep the door open, in the hope it may one day deliver, even if we are a good 20 years away from that now.

Yes. I think some people confuse knowledge with intelligence. Knowledge is a collective possession of humanity that accumulates down the centuries and possibly increases exponentially. But people in earlier times were obviously intelligent. They built the pyramids, calculated the circumference of the Earth and so on. They just had fewer intellectual tools, and less information, to work with.

How could we know? Brain tissue does not get fossilised sufficiently perfectly. But there is no reason I am aware of to think early man was any less intelligent than we are today.

Arf arf. Quite!

Why don't you do a bit of reading about the energy transition? Many of the issues you mention are already being actively addressed, but you need to get a bit more granular in the applications to understand how they are tackled. Batteries for trains are one example. There are already battery operated trains for short shuttle services, where one can easily recharge the train at either end. However for long distance the obvious answer is indeed by providing a supply of electricity along the track, as has been done all over the world for a century already, either by overhead catenary or a 3rd rail. Ships are exploring ammonia as fuel, which is effectively a way to store hydrogen without needing to handle high pressures. Sail is being tried again, as a way to reduce fuel consumption rather than to rely on 100%. However, like trains, ship fuel consumption per tonne-km is very low so it is less high up the priority list than other modes of transport. Trucks and planes may need hydrogen or other non-fossil sourced fuel for burning, as batteries of any kind are inevitably rather bulky and heavy for very large power demands. So it is not and never has been all about batteries and, while the issue of (very rare) battery fires should not be dismissed, it is not a barrier to the take-up of battery technology. So I think we could do with a little less of the anti-EV propaganda videos from you on that point. Hidden agenda much, eh? 😁

I was wondering that myself.

The units of BMI are not %. If you really had a BMI <10 you would be dead, or close to it. If you talk crap, people will lose patience with you.

The answer to that question is all around you. Wind, solar and nuclear already provide a big proportion of electricity generation. Wind and solar are now less costly than fossil fuel generation. Battery fires are very rare, much rarer than with fossil fuelled vehicles, though certainly harder to extinguish.

Hydrogen at present is rather costly and inefficient to produce in a green manner, i.e. by electrolysis. I think we will need it, though, for truck fuel and maybe for planes. For private vehicles, electricity looks like the future. Range is improving all the time, battery technology improves every year (there seems to be a sodium battery technology coming along which should reduce our geopolitically sensitive dependence on lithium) and the charging networks (another key element of infrastructure) are growing, though arguably not fast enough. I intend to buy an electric car next, but at present my 20yr old petrol VW works fine and from what I read, the size of the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new vehicle outweighs the reduction from switching from petrol to electricity. So one should run old cars into the ground before renewing.

Certainly. But the most important infrastructure change I think is rewiring the country. We need to move from a power grid system based on centralised generation to a distributed generation model (solar, wind, storage). We also we need to provide for the charging of electric vehicles, in place of fossil fuel stations, which adds considerable load to the domestic power supply. We also need to make more use of rail where population density makes this feasible, and make better provision for cycling in cities.

Good point about refraction. That occurred to me too, after I had posted, but I wasn't sure how significant it would be, if the laser and the reflectors were all at the same height above the ground.

Good point. I should think so, yes.

What I would do is get a large and a smaller polystyrene cup, perhaps from a coffee or cold drink dispenser, wrap the outer surface of the smaller one in aluminium foil (to reduce radiative heat transfer) then wrap that in bubble wrap, and put the whole lot into the bigger cup.

Bubble wrap?

Acc. @geordief's link, an idiot called Washington Irving, in 1828.