GrahamF

Let's say there was a way to make a duplicate of yourself. Assume it's a perfect copy that is identical to you in every way, except that the copy is legally your slave/servant. It's easy enough to go through the process knowing you would have someone who always does your bidding, but it might be easy to forget that your copy is also you, with the same experiences and memories. The other you had expected to get a servant, only to realize that you had become the servant. A truly narcissistic personality would react very badly to this situation. To properly plan for the event you have to prepare yourself to not just be the master, but also the servant. Because both futures face you at the same time, requiring you to be able to anticipate both as they will happen simultaneously to you.

A gasification kit would be unrealistic to take backpacking, but I suppose a tiny (like smaller then a 2l milk jug) ice generator that uses a standard kerosene tank might be doable, if it has a small battery and start-stop technology. It wouldn't be as cheap and would need to be very efficient but it's an avenue worth exploring.

If you have unlimited access to water and have a campfire going anyways, how important is it to be 100% efficient?

Could you have a device where instead of a large boiler tank you just had a fireproof pipe loop with a flash boiler of some sort and a steady water source? It could have a water bag or a feed from a river that it pumps to the flash boiler on demand which is then fed to the generator for electricity. So there would be a thin hose that's fed from a bucket or a bag which gets fed into a self-contained device that pumps the water into a very thin pipe that ends with a metal bulb you place directly into the fire, which turns the water into steam which goes into a different pipe (or the other channel on a combined hose or pipe) back to the device, which converts it to electricity for use, with a battery or capacitor acting to regulate the electrical power.

I'm mostly just wanting to find any real world examples, such as published reaserch. There seems to be a disconnect between what people think happens in the days and years after a nuclear bomb strike and the observed reality, and I was exploring where else those disconnects occur. I haven't been able to find any Information on empirical testing on modern technology, however I'm aware any reaserch that does exist is likely classified. Modern technology is more durable on some ways and more fragile in others. I was wondering how changes over time would affect the technical - would improved anti-static measures and insulation do a sufficient job of protecting modern devices I asked this a few months ago and checked on the thread when I posted the other. I saw it had no responses so I poked it a little.

If we don't have such clear observations, is it plausible that our current technology would be resilient enough that after an EMP attack we could just reboot our power grid and everything works fine?

Would it be possible to make a very compact and lightweight steam engine powering an electric generator that can be taken back country camping and used to keep lights and other devices charged the entire time just by looping it into the campfire? And could it be expanded to being hooked into the wood stove of a cabin to keep the lights and other devices running as long as there is a fire in the stove? How cheaply could such a generator be made while still producing an acceptable amount of power, such as charging a smartphone at full speed in the small camping version and possibly running a full cabin's lighting and a computer and Starlink internet connection in a larger version?

I'd first want to clarify what exactly consciousness is, and how it functions. For starters, are we simply assuming that every single human has consciousness? Studies have found that a percentage of everyday people have no internal dialogue, and there are people with mental disorders such as autism or down syndrome or psychopathy that have severely restricted the functionality of their minds. Is it possible to consider that some people with even more severe disorders or illnesses may not qualify as having consciousness? Are we conflating the concept of consciousness with the concept of a soul, and rejecting the notion that our minds are not as mystical as we wish? We know that various parts of the brain are responsible for different tasks, and most of those can be broken down to functions an AI can achieve. Free will can be broken down to systems that determine priority between various concurrently running objectives, and systems that determine the priority of immediate and long-term solutions to those objectives. We could eventually rely on empirical observations. There are projects attempting to create a digital simulation of a human brain and all its neural connections. They're currently limited to simulating only a small number of neurons, but as technology progresses, they can build more powerful supercomputers capable of simulating even more. If they one day get to the point where they can fully emulate a human nervous system in its entirety and it can talk and think and act like a conscious human, that would be a solid piece of evidence then.

Stuff like pictures of a chip under a microscope and such, stuff that shows the physical damage. I know that general consensus is that electronics will be destroyed by an AMP, but I'd like to look up at what point or conditions would a device just need to be rebooted or if it will be unaffected. I'm wondering if work over the years to protect electronics from electrostatic shock would add some form of resistance to them?

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, and his students came up with a white paint that reflects 98.1 percent of solar radiation. The white paint actually emits more infrared heat than it absorbs. For example, previous experiments showed this paint cooling a surface by 8 degrees Fahrenheit versus the surroundings under noon sunlight. At night, the ultra-white material can keep things 19 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Wouldn't this functionally be a form of Maxwell's Demon?

Would it be possible to set up a very thin electromagnet capable of forcing neutrons to slow down dramatically and converting the energy to electricity, or using a series of thermocouples to directly convert the heat to energy?

Say you had a 1kg lead sphere that, by using a hypothetical form of antigravity, can be changed from a mass of 1g to 1t without affecting any other physical properties. if you pushed it so it was moving at say 1m/s then changed it's mass up or down; would the speed stay the same but the kinetic force changes, or would the kinetic force stay the same and the speed would change?

...what about an electromagnet? Could there be a way to set up a superconductor that can absorb the energy of the neutrons as they pass through, slowing them down and generating electricity that way?

I was mostly trying to determine would would be needed to devise a more efficient method absorbing and using the energy from the nuclear reactions. Like, say, a molecular level lattice system that has a complicated configuration of various elements that when struck with high energy particles directly absorbs them and releases electricity

What properties would a material need to be able to efficiently convert energy from a fission reaction into electricity? Let's say we had a device that used thin round plates of fissile material. The fissile material is well below critical mass, but you can stack them to achieve critical mass. Now imagine we have something called... idunno, a "Magischeibe" which is a flat disk that's stacked alternating with the fissile material like a voltaic pile. The Magischeibe can allow enough energy to pass through for the critical mass reaction, but is able to absorb a portion of the energy to convert to electricity. there's a couple potential ways to control the power output: The stack can be spread open like an accordion to control the distance between the fissile plates in a neutralizing liquid medium The Magischeibe can be slid in and out of the pile as part of longer plate where the other half is a reaction neutralizing material The Magischeibe can change it's properties to change how much energy it's converting to a useable form and how much it's passing through What material properties would be needed to make such a device, and what level of efficiency could be possible? thanks