Bitcoin Forum

A conversation started at http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23054.40 about "Forcing people when you don't have to is bad" vs "Forcing people is bad".

The right and the ability are two different things.

Every man woman and child has the right to the knowledge of, and how to apply, any of humanity's technological advances.

That's not to say that those who sell plutonium shouldn't apply sound judgment in whom they sell to. ;)

I agree that knowledge shouldn't be censored, even about how to build weapons of mass destruction. If lots of people know how to do it, then when somebody tries to do it, many people will understand what they're doing and try to stop them. Its needed for power to be balanced. Its also important to advance science and solve the world's problems. Knowledge is ok. Actions sometimes are not.

+1

Don't forget that there are perfectly legitimate reasons to own, say, a 10 kT nuke. Asteroid mining, anyone?

what does that mean? what is a legitimate reason? it depends on where you stand.


is it better to mine on a asteroid? is there some kind of cooling in the space so that my GPUs don't burn?
and WTF does nukes have to do with mining?

Oh dear god, I hope you're joking, because I am laughing my ass right off. You do realize that before 2009, 'mining' meant digging stuff up out of the ground, right?

(But yes, a GPU farm in space would have AWESOME cooling, provided it was kept in the shade)

There are legitimate uses for almost everything, but as I see it the important question is: Does x benefit society overall compared to the lack of x (including the means of enforcing the lack of x)? (and the same question for all ways to organize and influence or control x) If not, then we shouldn't have x until that changes.

The ends do not justify the means; The ends plus the side-effects justify the means.

How? It could only radiate away heat, which isn't nearly as good as the cooling options we have on Earth.

im jokeing! but the first thing i was thinking about was, actually bitcoin mining. just felt a need to share my thoughts.

I tend to take the opposite view, that the means should justify the ends. I'd also like to point out that often, the means determines the ends.


Radiation sucks when the difference is a few degrees C. It's fricking amazing when the difference is a few hundred. (Space is really really cold)

I only said it that way to compare it to the common idea that "The ends do not justify the means." It makes more sense to say it this way... The ends, means, and side-effects taken as a whole should have to be positive.

Sadly, morals do not easily fit along a number line from positive to negative. Where, exactly, does keeping a terrorist from getting a nuke stand, compared to terrorizing hundreds or thousands or millions of people yourself?

I didn't say people agreed on what is moral and what isn't. Whatever the most people agree is moral, what I said applies to that.

Definitely not. Its frigging amazing how we havent blown ourselves to pieces yet. Letting more people have nukes has a a high chance of spelling disaster. Too many people who couldnt give a shit about M.A.D. around

Why don't nuclear armed countries war with each other? Because the rulers would actually have to put themselves at risk rather than just the men they use as pawns.  Private nukes would encourage secession, fewer invasions and fewer large nation-states. That would be a very good thing. 

Non-proliferation is a pipe dream. It's impossible to disinvent technology. The only two alternatives to concentrated power are distributed power and death.

robert heinlein wrote a story once, examining the premise of this thread.

it took place on another world with an unbreathable atmosphere, which had homo saps living inside environmentally controlled, protective domes.  maybe it was the moon - i'm not sure.  somebody who has heinlein fresher in their mind will come along, i imagine.  they usually do...

anyway, the upshot was that any weapon an individual could make, buy, own or carry was perfectly fine - as long as it couldn't breach the dome that sustained life for the humans who lived there.

seems pretty clear - and i've never run across a better solution.

Then uninvent the Nuke for me, 'k?

Now that nukes exist, I think everyone should get some.

Literally.


For example, I live in Brazil, that has no nukes. Brazil commonly bend over to nuke-bearing nations in ways that are crap to me.

If I had my own nuke, I could enforce Brazil to not do that, or secede.


In fact, I was looking the only small state of the world that is really interesting: Singapore, achieved that by having absurd military power.

You could use the nukes to power a badass cooling facility for your asteroid based rigs...

I forgot to reply to the main topic, here is my reply:


Build? Yes.
Own? Yes.
Use? Depends.

mmmm.

firstly, you should look into brazil's Parallel Program of the 1970's and 80s.  you will find that your premise is not quite as accurate as you believe.  brazil may or may not have had nuclear weapons - accounts differ - but they entered the arena.

secondly, i will also point out that nuclear weapons only have value as a threat.  using them removes one's leverage.  and almost certainly one's self as well.  they are suicide weapons; excepting the case of their first (and anecdotally only) use by the US, against japan.

I know we like discussing the extreme cases, but I think we can understand this question a little better if we look at the basic concepts.

Like any weapon, the use of which can be deadly, it boils down to the condition or definition of imminent threat.

I define the definition of imminent threat (intent to do harm) as a function described by certain variables. There are mainly four determinants.

1) Proximity,
2) Capability,
3) Inertial reference frame and,
4) Vector (magnitude and direction).

All of the above variables need to be considered for imminent threat to become realized. For example: owning a nuclear bomb out in the middle of nowhere probably wouldn't be classified as a real threat. Now place the bomb in an ICBM and now were getting a little warmer. Point it in my direction, and now I'm a little nervous. Start the count down, light the fuse and set the target vector and now I feel like I need to retaliate or at least respond in kind.

Of course, nothing happens until it does. I just wouldn't want to be the guy to get it wrong and push the button and capriciously (perhaps viciously) kill thousands or millions of innocent civilians. Imminent threat is a bit like horseshoes and hand grenades, it's a bit iffy. It's all about intentions mainly, and even when that appears to be clear, you better be darn certain of yourself.

What about the people who think they get a better afterlife if they kill the nonbelievers?

(To those people... You can't make somebody believe something by threatening them. You can only make them say it. While I don't believe in Satan, I see a strong similarity between Satan and such a god that would tell you to kill nonbelievers, so you're making things worse with your threats.)

Brazil have the tech, no actual nukes.

Like the other guy said, if they are not really ready, they are not that threatening.

Blueprints do not a bomb make, eh?

If someone is found to be building a dangerous bomb, sure pre-emptive defence may be needed.

There are legitimate uses for a nuke, you know.

Alright then. Extremist people can all the nukes they want? Bad idea. Dangerous.

In the rare case a nuke is useful, people will want to be ensured it is being used safely.

I have yet to see a single convincing argument that the right people to do that are the coercive monopolies.

I know. And we've seen governments abuse nuclear technology in the past.

But no way can you sit back while you watch people make a nuke without reassurances at the least.

Once again, I find myself turning to excerpting "Alongside Night" (http://www.alongsidenight.net):

Radiant cooling doesn't work so well in a vacuum...what exactly is that heat energy passing to?

Perfect vacuums do not exist in nature.

Edit: Processors in space are cooled using a Heat pipe (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Heat_pipe)

Edit2: But that is apparently to keep the temperature relatively constant: "As satellites orbit, one side is exposed to the direct radiation of the sun while the opposite side is completely dark and exposed to the deep cold of outer space. This causes severe discrepancies in the temperature (and thus reliability and accuracy) of the transponders."

Edit3 and what I should have said all along: It's not transferring to anything. it's radiating. Thus the term.

You need to wikipedia some thermodynamics. Heat energy cannot be dissipated into nothing. It requires matter to absorb the energy. In the relative vacuum of space, their is not enough matter for radiant cooling in conventional terms to be efficient. I just asked my physicist ladyfriend, and she said my theory sounds correct. Good enough for me to stand behind it...she knows a hell of a low more about thermodynamics than I do.

You need to wikipedia some thermodynamics. Heat energy cannot be dissipated into nothing. It requires matter to absorb the energy. In the relative vacuum of space, their is not enough matter for radiant cooling in conventional terms to be efficient. I just asked my physicist ladyfriend, and she said my theory sounds correct. Good enough for me to stand behind it...she knows a hell of a low more about thermodynamics than I do.
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Right then. Explain the wikipedia quote, then. But do it in another thread, lest this one get too far off track.

Right then. Explain the wikipedia quote, then. But do it in another thread, lest this one get too far off track.
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This thread is absolutely retarded.

The wikipedia quote says that the side exposed to the sun heats up...even though space is extremely cold. That is because there is no matter to absorb the 'radiant' heat. The heat pipe that you linked actively (requiring power input) equalizes the temperature of the device. In a true vacuum, an object would never cool down...or rather it would, but very slowly through the gradual process of dissipation through brownian motion and other miniscule forces at work.

Very well. Any mod that wishes, can and should split this thread off here:

In the meantime:
Wikipedia: Radiation (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Radiation#Infrared)

Thank you, come again.

Why do people give off inferred radiation? Inferred cameras? When we get hot, isn't some of the heat transferred into radiation?

This is common sense to me since I know about thermal imaging cameras but please explain in a scientific way someone.

Myrkul is almost never right about anything, so I hate to agree with him, but surprisingly, he's right this time.  I'm a physicist by training.  Radiation can be emitted by an object in a vacuum without a problem (it's how the Sun emits heat that reaches us, even though the intervening space is almost perfectly a vacuum).  Further, it's the dominant way that hot objects lose heat, since the heat emitted via radiation scales as (temperature)^4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan–Boltzmann_law).  You don't notice it while sitting in your room because all the heat you're losing through radiation is being replaced by all the other objects in the room radiating back at you; in space, you'd notice it quickly.

I've heard thing get cold really quickly in space. The temperatures in the dark side of the moon are extremely low while the other side is much hotter. The Earth retains heat in the atmosphere.

The sun is ejecting matter and consuming itself to project that heat through the intervening vacuum. We are talking about infrared band energy here, such as a graphics card would produce. It is not emitting energy as alpha or beta or gamma particles, and it is not emitting energy as photons. So how is it comparable to the sun? We are talking about hundreds of orders of magnitude difference here.

The Stefan-Boltzmann law that you refer to only applies to black body (perfect) radiators, which do not exist. Furthermore, it reinforces my claim that the energy will not be transferred unless there is matter for it to transfer to. It is essentially irrelevant in this context.

It is like the difference between air and liquid cooling. Liquid is more dense than air, and thus, it can absorb more heat faster. This is why 80F in the air is comfortable, whereas 80F in the water will give you hypothermia eventually. Now imagine that air is the liquid, and the vacuum of space is the air cooling...same concept applies: the more dense material is much more efficient at absorbing that radiant heat...hence a cooling fan does not work in space, but an active cooling system like a heat pipe does.

No one ever argued that convection wasn't more efficient than radiation.

What we said is: It's fucking cold in space. With nothing radiating back, the item in question will lose heat rather rapidly.

Radiation is perfectly capable of travelling through vacuum without any intervening matter.  In the simplest conception, you can think of the energy being stored in the electromagnetic field, which doesn't need matter to be there (there's even an equation for the energy density in the field, u = epsilon_0/2 E^2 + 1/2\mu_0 B^2).  The Sun is ejecting a little bit of matter (which you see as solar wind), but the overwhelming amount of energy hitting Earth is in the form of radiation (those photons that you seem to think aren't being emitted and aren't heating and illuminating your day).  To be precise, about 1000 W per m^2 of solar radiation hits the Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight).  Blackbody radiation is an idealization, just like something like an ideal gas, but it's not too far off from the reality (again, see the figure here that compares the blackbody radiation spectrum to the actual solar spectrum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight).

The Wikipedia articles on "Radiation" and "Electromagnetic Radiation" are very readable.  I'd encourage you to read them.

I was talking about this theoretical graphics card in space...not the sun. That much I am certain of.

I am saying that any piece of complex electronic equipment, if it is to function in space, needs an active cooling (and heating) solution. A fan 'blowing' on a GPU's heatsink in space would be completely ineffective and would not serve to cool the heatsink in any significant manner. You don't use space to cool things off. It just doesn't work.

If space is 'so fucking cold' that everything just cools off instantly, then why link to an article about heat pipes in satellites?

Because I discovered that article in seeking the correct answer. in reading that article, I found the quote. Which, I might add, you still haven't addressed. I was admitting I might be wrong. In doing so, I found out that Yes, I was in fact right all along. Please, read about thermal radiation.

Back on the original topic, I've got something small but hopefully meaningful to add: There are teenagers graduating high school today who have been taught more advanced science than I learned in college. In the next generation or two, there will probably be sixth graders with a more thorough and correct understanding of the atom than my college chem professor - not because they're brilliant but just because they're lucky to be educated in a time when we understand more.

Some day we will discover something truly devastating and there will be no way to hide it. In the past governments controlled nuclear technology by controlling the knowledge: most folks just didn't have the skills or technology to build something like this. Today they control the technology by controlling the fuel: weapons-grade plutonium is pretty damn hard to get your hands on (at least for the average Joe). Some day we'll move past fission and on to fusion. Unlike fission, fusion doesn't require special unstable heavy versions of already-rare elements - you can do it with that most abundant of all elements, hydrogen. At first, the knowledge will be the barrier; few will know how to kickstart a fusion reaction, it will be the realm of the scientific elite and the governments who can afford to pay them. We will make both generators and bombs, because that's what we humans do with new tech. It won't be long, though, before the knowledge is no barrier - information has a way of slipping free given enough time - and what is to stop people from destroying each other then?

It's an arms race of sorts, except the reward isn't national pride or oil - the reward is the continued survival of our species. If science continues unhindered in its current direction, we will some day have a technology that can utterly destroy our entire planet at low cost and high availability. We have to be ready to deal with that knowledge when it comes; not as individuals or nations but as an entire species - we must prepare for a world where every 12 year old can kill everything that lives. Hopefully we're up to the task.

"As satellites orbit, one side is exposed to the direct radiation of the sun while the opposite side is completely dark and exposed to the deep cold of outer space. This causes severe discrepancies in the temperature (and thus reliability and accuracy) of the transponders."

The EM energy of the sun heats the satellite. The side that doesn't get hit with the Sun's EM radiation is remains cold.

By your logic, the heat of the side being struck by the suns radiation should cool instantly. The external temperature of the device is exactly the same on both sides. The only difference is the influx of EM radiation. So why doesn't this ultra-cold space wick away all the heat like it would on earth? Matter...the lack of it to be specific.

@RandyFolds Inferred is electromagnetic radiation similar to light. It is hence made up of photons.

If you can irradiate heat through a vacuum then the Earth would be bloody hot, receiving all that heat over the years but never giving any away through the vacuum of space.

Conduction is done through both particle collision and photons, I'm guessing?

I love the way that a discussion about individuals building WMDs has morphed into a discussion about cooling GPU cards in outer space!

Apropos the WMDs, there's an interesting short story about an atheist talking to god (http://www.fullmoon.nu/articles/art.php?id=tal), where god discusses the evolution of intelligent civilizations. God says that civilizations inevitably go through a number of phases (for example the discovery of flight), and the most dangerous phase is the one where any one individual has the ability to kill off the whole civilization.

I think it's safer for WMDs to be controlled by individuals than by governments, because individuals will put more effort into defending against WMDs than into aggressing with WMDs. Governments tend to have psychopathic behaviours which make them not well-suited to be the ones with their "finger on the button".

It was over five years ago when I read the short story that contained the notion of individuals being able to destroy their entire civilization. I looked for it again, and found the relevant paragraph, but it wasn't quite as I had remembered it. Here's this part of the story:

An algorithm? Our species needs to grow up considerably before we can afford to make the discovery? Bitcoin? Too late to stop that algorithm being discovered!

PS: Yikes! While I was composing this post, enmaku posted similar ideas but from a non-fiction perspective...

No, please, do keep going. I love watching people make fools of themselves.

1. Never said instant. I said 'rather quickly'
2. and when the satellite rotates, so now the 'cold' side is facing the sun, what happens to the heat that is stored in the metal?

That's right, it radiates away.

The Earth is bloody hot. Granted, much of that is the greenhouse effect based on the presence of an atmosphere. If there were no atmosphere, the side facing the sun would be ridiculously hot and the side facing away ridiculously cold...a 2nd grader can tell you that.  That is essentially why a 15 billion dollar rover is sitting in a block of ice on mars right now...

"Light" is an arbitrary section of the EM spectra based on human's visual range. All energy is EM energy.

To be clear, the scale matters here. When talking about suns and planets, there is a lot of matter in the 'vacuum' of space. On a more human scale, it is pretty empty.

No, it is distributed over the device by the 'Heat Pipe' that you linked to. Operating temperature isn't the issue, consistency of temperature is. Besides, satellites aren't hurtling though space in a tumble. They maintain their alignment with the earth more or less.

You have got to be kidding me. The heat pipe is to regulate the heat distribution to prevent the dark side from getting too cold. (and the hot side from getting too hot) Absent that heat pipe, the temperature differential would stress and destroy the satellite in fairly short order. And what, exactly, does their alignment with the earth have to do with their alignment to the sun? I never even implied that it tumbled. I said 'rotate'.

How did we get from GPU to satellite? We are talking about mining bitcoin in space, for christ's sake. You could at least try and stay on topic.  ;D

Basically, anything to derail this ridiculous thread. No, everyone should not have a nuke..especially when they've been drinking.

Figured you were trolling. Nobody could be that stupid and still manage to type coherently.

Since you've finally expressed an on-topic opinion, care to back it up?

@RandyFolds Do you deny inferred is made with photons?

If the earth relied on heat transfer through vibrating particle collisions only, we'd all be melting. In fact when particles in space hit earth, they heat up through friction and don't cool the earth down.

Nukes... nukes release a lot of radiation, don't they? :P

What is a photon Matthew? What's it made out of?
Hit wikipedia for some particle-wave duality. I do not deny that infrared is electromagnetic radiation, but I cannot be certain if it is a photon, nor can you.

If we didn't have an atmosphere we'd all be melting. And then freezing. And then melting. Oh the wonders if an insulating layer of atmosphere.

myrkul: statistics back me up. they say that half of the world is below average intelligence, which is a pretty fucking low bar as it is. retards shouldn't have nukes, it's as simple as that.

How many nukes do you need to pump water or similar cooling liquid across a significant percentage of the volume of a city sized asteroid for a lifetime?

Retards can't build nukes. Your argument's moot.

The issue though is all it takes is one crazy person to fuck up the entire globe...

You know people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki still, right?

Takes more than one or two stray nukes to fuck up the whole planet.

I was thinking of the big ones that can single-handedly trigger a nuclear winter or at the very least disrupt climate patterns in a global scale

Now, those... Those need watching.

That said, that much fissionable material doesn't get bought without somebody noticing, And I think we can trust the people who produce nuclear materials to be relatively concerned with the continuation of the planet.

But seriously, you don't want people making nukes in their back yard. You especially want to stop terrorist groups making them.

You can't stop terrorist groups from making them. You can only give terrorists a monopoly on them by saying everybody can't make nukes.

Can't stop Governments from giving them to Terrorists to False Flag someone either.  Oh wait, that never happens.

Oh yeah? I bet Paris Hilton can afford to pay someone to build her a nuke, and then she holds the detonator. Retards can buy nukes.

As far as those still living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are estimates that the residual effects of the two bombings are still responsible for about 10,000 deaths a year. Those bombs were teeny-tiny. And if one person uses another, then someone is retaliating...if it went off, it would go off to the point of obliterating human life.

And if someone as dense as yourself can make that calculation, I'm sure Paris Hilton can figure it out.

And that'll be your downfall...putting any faith in humanity to do 'the right' thing. We are power-hungry animals.

Won't be my downfall. I have no intention of selling nukes, much less to morons. Though if you'd like to see what I think will happen, Look back to that excerpt.