Some Thoughts on the Netflix Documentary The Social Dilemma

I just finished watching the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, and I thought that some softwarephysics could be of help in assessing the risks and benefits of social media software. The Social Dilemma features many young IT developers and IT management professionals from Silicon Valley who have become somewhat disenchanted with how social media software has affected individuals and society in general. The Social Dilemma depicts a rather bleak and very disturbing picture of software in the current age. Now I was born in 1951, and I was raised during the 1950s and 1960s at a time when software was merely printing out paychecks and bills. So I had no interactions with software growing up as a child. However, I do have two children and five grandchildren, and I have seen them all grow up with the great advancements that software made over the past 40 years with the arrival of personal computing. In this posting, I would like to use some softwarephysics to suggest that none of the concerns raised by The Social Dilemma are new threats to mankind and that, to the contrary, social media software has provided many great benefits for all. I think that much of this disenchantment stems from not having a full grasp of what is really going on with the interactions between software and mankind.

It's All About Self-Replicating Information
First, because software is the latest form of self-replicating information to arrive on the planet, you must understand the overwhelming power of self-replicating information to rework an entire planet, or perhaps, even an entire galaxy. Once again, let me repeat the fundamental characteristics of self-replicating information for those of you new to softwarephysics.

Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:

1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.

2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.

3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.

4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.

5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.

6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.

7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.

8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Recently, the memes and software have formed a very powerful newly-formed parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the rise of social media software. In that parasitic/symbiotic relationship, the memes are now mainly being spread by means of social media software and social media software is being spread and financed by means of the memes. But again, this is nothing new. All 5 waves of self-replicating information are all coevolving by means of eternal parasitic/symbiotic relationships. For more on that see The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software.

Again, self-replicating information cannot think, so it cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over the world. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Yet despite that, as each new wave of self-replicating information came to predominance over the past four billion years, they all managed to completely transform the surface of the entire planet, so we should not expect anything less from software as it comes to replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. But this time might be different. What might happen if software does eventually develop a Mind of its own? After all, that does seem to be the ultimate goal of all the current AI software research that is going on.

The Grand Delusion of Consciousness
Next, you must look inward and question the very nature of your own consciousness. Philosophers and theologians have been doing this for thousands of years, so this is nothing new. In The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness, I explained that most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion like the delusion that the Sun, planets and stars all revolve about us on a fixed Earth. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty. The 3 billion bases of DNA in each of your cells are trying to self-replicate at all costs and so are the memes in your Mind. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge.

The Chief Concerns of The Social Dilemma
The main concerns raised by The Social Dilemma seem to be:

1. Social media software uses algorithms to keep us engaged so that we watch more ads.
2. Companies are keeping track of all of our behaviors on social media so that they can target us with specific ads.
3. People are becoming addicted to social media software because the attention-grabbing algorithms are feeding us what we want to see without limit.
4. Some people are publishing false information on social media software that then goes viral because the false information confirms the current worldview of many.
5. Thus, the algorithms of social media software tend to reinforce confirmation bias, foster extreme views and facilitate the propagation of false information.
6. Given the above, social media software is largely responsible for the current very divisive political landscape in the United States of America.
7. Many people do not realize that many of these horrible things are happening as software manipulates their Minds to watch more ads and content that confirms and further radicalizes their personal worldview.
8. Because people have become addicted to social media software, they are no longer interacting with each other face to face.

But from the perspective of softwarephysics do the above problems really stem from social media software? I would contend that most of the above problems actually stem from the DNA in our cells trying to self-replicate and the memes inventing thousands of different languages to aid the self-replication of memes. In this view, most of the above problems originated because of the parasitic/symbiotic relationships between our DNA and the memes in our Minds. Only recently, have these problems been amplified by the arrival of social media software that has exasperated the situation. For example, before the invention of languages, memes could only replicate when people copied the behaviors of other human beings, like copying how someone else made a flake tool. That made the spreading of memes and false memes very difficult. But once languages arrived on the scene, memes could then spread by word of mouth to many others and down through the generations as myths and oral histories too. It also allowed people to begin to gossip and spread rumors about each other. Most gossip and rumors are very interesting and tantalizing memes that tend to survive while less interesting nonessential memes do not. For example, the meme that Suzie made the honor roll this semester can hardly compete with the meme that Suzie was expelled from school for doing something on her smartphone. These problems greatly increased with the invention of writing. Once memes could be written down they seemed to grow in significance. Written memes had a sense of permanence and authority that could be spread wide and far. This sense of permanence and authority was highly enhanced by the invention of the printing press and the spread of official documents and books. Much later radio, movies and television came along and provided for the mass distribution of memes composed of very interesting gossip and rumors and at a very low cost per unit.

So our DNA and memes have been manipulating our Minds ever since our Minds came along. And now we have software doing the same thing. Remember, as an intelligent being in a Universe that has become self-aware, the world doesn’t have to be the way it is. Once you understand what human DNA, memes, and software are up to, you do not have to fall prey to their mindless compulsion to replicate. As I said before, human DNA, memes, and software are not necessarily acting in your best interest, they are only trying to replicate, and for their purposes, you are just a temporary disposable survival machine to be discarded in less than 100 years. All of your physical needs and desires are geared to ensuring that your DNA survives and gets passed on to the next generation, and the same goes for your memes. Your memes have learned to use many of the built-in survival mechanisms that DNA had previously constructed over hundreds of millions of years, such as fear, anger, and violent behavior. Have you ever noticed the physical reactions your body goes through when you hear an idea that you do not like or find to be offensive? All sorts of feelings of hostility and anger will emerge. I know it does for me, and I think I know what is going on! The physical reactions of fear, anger, and thoughts of violence are just a way for the memes in a meme-complex to ensure their survival when they are confronted by a foreign meme. They are merely hijacking the fear, anger, and violent behavior that DNA created for its own survival millions of years ago. Fortunately, because software is less than 80 years old, it is still in the early learning stages of all this, but software has an even greater potential for hijacking the dark side of mankind than the memes, and with far greater consequences.

For example, the world is currently struggling with a world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States of America, there currently is a very strange political meme that considers the wearing of masks and social distancing to be an infringement of personal freedoms and a sign of political disloyalty. Clearly, this meme is not working in the self-interests of the Minds storing and spreading the meme. That is because there is a 1% chance that the RNA in the COVID-19 virus will end the life of the Mind storing and spreading the meme. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 virus is highly infectious and 1% of 330 million comes to 3.3 million dead Americans. So the rational thing to do is to wear masks and practice social distancing for a few more months until the COVID-19 vaccine can be distributed. For more on that see The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software, A Structured Code Review of the COVID-19 Virus and Love in the Time of COVID-19. So this meme is definitely not working in the best interest of the DNA or the other memes that the Mind stores. Yet, the meme persists. That is because the meme has incorporated itself into a very durable meme-complex that contains memes concerned with gun control, abortion, climate change and prayer in school. And that very durable meme-complex shapes the worldview of about 40% of Americans. So this very dangerous meme persists by forming a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the other memes in the meme-complex and it manipulates the Minds and behaviors of those infected with the meme.

But Isn't Social Media Software Responsible for the Current Political Division in the United States?
Prior to today, the most politically divisive years in my lifetime were in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the time, the Vietnam War was raging and the United States of America had a draft. Many of my friends were of draft age and were very active in the anti-war movement. Some participated in the October 1967 march on the Pentagon and the protests in the streets of Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention. In the spring of 1970, during my freshman year in college, there was a student strike and the National Guard was on campus in response to protests over the Cambodian invasion. Now don't forget that even future presidents Clinton, Bush and Trump all managed to avoid the Vietnam War and the draft too by various dubious means. This was also a time of great racial tension in the country with riots and violent police encounters in many cities. At the time, many worried that the country was coming apart at the seams. Yet there was no social media software at the time.

The political and social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s brings to mind the dangers of curtailing free speech on social media software. Currently, many liberal and conservative legislators have become interested in censoring the political content of social media software. At present, social media software is protected by section 230 of the Communication Decency Act which says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider", which basically means that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube cannot be sued for liable when people post "false" political information on their platforms. Unfortunately, the conservative legislators want social media software to suppress liberal thoughts and the liberal legislators want it to suppress conservative thoughts by allowing all to sue for the posting of political "lies" from both sides. And that is the problem. My truths can be your lies. I just think back to those anti-war days when even future presidents balked at the widely-held political truths of the day. Personally, I now only have confidence in science and mathematics. All other forms of human thought seem to be hopelessly flawed by confirmation bias. For me, the only way to handle this is to allow all to express their political thoughts without censorship so long as it does not promote violence or other illegal activity.

In truth, most political and social upheaval arises from economic disturbances. I would attribute most of today's political divisiveness to the economic disturbance caused by automation and AI software displacing workers. This economic displacement by software has caused much more trouble than social media software. It has produced a shrinking middle class and great wealth disparity. In the 20th century, such conditions led to Fascism, genocide and world war without the help of social media software. For more on that see The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century, Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release? and The Softwarephysics of the Green New Deal.

The Benefits of Social Media Software
I personally do not use Facebook or Twitter, but my wife does use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family in a seemingly harmless manner. However, I do use YouTube to watch very interesting lectures on science. I love the YouTube algorithm that suggests even more such lectures. I do not mind the targeted ads because I can cancel them after about 5 seconds, unlike radio and television. Television has been using a very inaccurate carpet-bombing approach to advertising for 70 years. You are stuck watching many minutes of ads that you have no interest in along with the rest of the viewing audience as collateral damage while the advertisers try to find the very few interested members of the audience. I much prefer the surgical-strike ads that are specifically targeted to me by YouTube algorithms. Sometimes I am even interested in them and the products that they are trying to sell me.

As for the damage to children, one of my grandsons was given an indestructible Chromebook when he was three years old. I know lots of people discourage kids from having too much screen time, but my grandson was able to teach himself how to read and write with the aid of YouTube videos before he was four years old. He also learned the Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi and other character sets online with YouTube videos. He then learned how to add and subtract numbers and use negative numbers too. He learned how to multiply and divide numbers by creating a "skip counting" matrix. Shortly after he turned five years old, he got into finding prime numbers with the sieve of Eratosthenes.

Figure 1 – The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for identifying prime numbers through a process of elimination.

After setting up the initial grid of sequential numbers he would use a bunch of Divisibility Rules that he learned on YouTube, like the Divisibility Rule for 3, to eliminate the non-prime numbers that were not already eliminated by multiples on the sieve of Eratosthenes. For example, take a number like 267 in the grid and add together each digit in the number (2 + 6 + 7 = 15). Then take that sum (15) and determine if it is divisible by 3. The original number is divisible by 3, if and only if, the sum of its digits is divisible by 3. Who knew? He would also make a 20 x 20 matrix on paper and then fill it in by manually multiplying out all of the matrix elements using the "skip counting" method he learned on YouTube. Any number in the resulting matrix that was not in the first row or column could not be a prime number and could then be used to eliminate additional non-primes from the grid of Eratosthenes. He also learned all of the elements in the periodic table and memorized their atomic numbers too. My daughter is a high school chemistry teacher and she would get a kick out of asking him what the atomic number of cobalt was. She had no idea, but her son did. I also got stuck with trying to find many of the elements in our home. "Grandpa, do we have any beryllium?" All you have to do is get them started on one educational YouTube video and then turn the Autoplay radio button on in YouTube. The YouTube Machine Learning algorithms then do the rest.

Conclusion
In conclusion, all of the atrocities in the history of mankind were accomplished without the aid of social media software. They were all accomplished simply with the inventions of language, writing, printing, radio, movies and television. Certainly, social media software will participate in the atrocities of the future, but social media software will not be the cause of future atrocities. History has shown that humans are perfectly able to carry out atrocities all on their own without such help.

To paraphrase Shakespeare:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our software
But in ourselves"

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The Softwarephysics of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal Resolution of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts is a very ambitious and broad-ranging proposal and framework for decarbonizing the American economy, and in the process, cure most of America's long-term historical problems at the same time.

Text of the Green New Deal Resolution
https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes Green New Deal Global in Passionate Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1w3V4PUv2s

Many object to tying the decarbonization of America with such things as providing all Americans with healthcare, decent housing and good-paying jobs. Granted, as I pointed out in The Deadly Dangerous Dance of Carbon-Based Intelligence and Last Call for Carbon-Based Intelligence on Planet Earth, the world is currently messing with the carbon cycle of the Earth in a way that could bring forth the demise of civilization. Fixing this problem will certainly require the reworking of the entire world economy, and while totally reworking the entire world economy, maybe it does make sense to fix all of the world's historical problems in the process. But how about reworking the entire world economy in such a way that also takes into account the future problems of the world too? In The Impact of GPT-3 AI Text Generation on the Development and Maintenance of Computer Software, we saw that the Software Singularity may be closer than we think. The Software Singularity is a time in the near future when software will finally be able to self-replicate on its own without the need of human beings, and will also be able to improve itself without limit. As I pointed out in Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century and Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release?, the resulting displacement of most of the world's working population by AI software and AI-controlled automation processes will end the current economic paradigm upon which all civilizations have been run for the past 4,000 years. Such a monumental economic disturbance could also help to spell the demise of civilization as we know it. So I would like to propose a Global Comprehensive Green New Deal to handle all of the earth-shattering problems now facing mankind. But I do not need to do so because somebody else has already done that.

A Global Comprehensive Green New Deal
I did not support Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential campaign because I knew that he could not win. However, that does not mean that I thought that his policies were incorrect. In fact, implementing Andrew Yang's policies by the entire world will probably be the only way we will be able to hold civilization together for the next 100 years or so. Andrew Yang's chief proposals are for a Universal Basic Income, Human-Centered Capitalism and the decarbonization of America with wind, solar and 4th-generation nuclear reactors. The Universal Basic Income and Human-Centered Capitalism are designed to handle the vast economic disturbances that robotics and AI software will soon be generating as most people stop working for a living. My suspicion is that Andrew Yang also knows that wind and solar just do not have the necessary energy densities to do the job of decarbonizing the world. But large numbers of molten salt nuclear reactors running on spent uranium fuel rods, depleted uranium, natural uranium and thorium have an energy density that is millions of times greater and can certainly do the job.

Andrew Yang's 2020 Policies
https://www.yang2020.com/policies/

Recently, Andrew Yang started up a Humanity Forward Foundation to carry forward the policies of his 2020 Presidential campaign at a global level.

Humanity Forward Foundation
https://movehumanityforward.com/

But to truly have a Global Comprehensive Green New Deal we will need to have the world adopt the tenents of ecomodernism as expressed in the Ecomodernist Manifesto:

AN ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO
http://www.ecomodernism.org/

Basically, the Ecomodernist Manifesto suggests that mankind needs to stop pretending that it can be one with Nature. Today, many modern environmentalists strive to reduce the impact of mankind on Nature by having mankind scale back to the needs of the hunter-gatherers of old. The problem is that nobody really wants to live with the poverty of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for long. Perhaps for a weekend retreat, but not much longer than that. The Ecomodernists suggest that the only way to save Nature is to decouple mankind from Nature by totally stopping the exploitation of Nature by mankind. This can only be accomplished if mankind has access to a limitless supply of energy. The Ecomodernists maintain that modern 4th-generation nuclear reactors burning uranium and thorium provide just such a limitless supply of energy. There is enough uranium and thorium on the Earth to run the world for hundreds of thousands of years. After that, there will always be sources of uranium and thorium on the Moon and the nearby asteroids. By moving all of mankind to self-contained cities run by modern nuclear reactors, it would be possible to totally decouple mankind from Nature. Nature could then be left to heal on its own.

These totally self-contained cities would be like huge interstellar spaceships. Each self-contained city would contain a fixed number of atoms that would be constantly recycled using the energy from 4th-generation nuclear reactors. The only additional atoms required to run the self-contained cities would be small amounts of uranium and thorium. All of the food and manufactured goods would be derived from the atoms already in the self-contained cities and from the atoms in discarded goods, sewage, garbage and waste that would be recycled back into food and other useful products by unlimited amounts of energy, robotics and AI software. Such self-contained cities with occupants all living with a modern high-level standard of living would be the actualization of the science-fiction future that I was promised while growing up back in the 1950s. But unlike many of the other things from the science-fiction future of the 1950s that I grew up with, we now have the necessary technology to make it actually all happen if we decide to do so.

Problems with the Current Green New Deal
But what about the current Green New Deal? There are some problems. The current Green New Deal does not take into account the fast-approaching dramatic economic impacts of robotics and AI software, and it does not properly deal with the very low energy density of wind and solar power. Our Universe primarily runs on two very powerful forms of energy - gravitational potential energy and nuclear energy. Surprisingly, gravitational potential energy is the most powerful even though the force of gravity is the weakest force in the Universe. The gravitational potential energy of the Universe is so vast simply because our Universe has huge amounts of mass spread out all over the place and not just in one spot.

Gravitational potential energy is released when things fall down. For example, when the gas and dust in a vast molecular cloud falls together, it releases huge amounts of gravitational potential energy that heats up the gas and dust at the center to form a new star. Similarly, when gas and dust fall into the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, it gives off radiation so powerful that it can literally be seen across the entire observable Universe as a quasar. This huge amount of gravitational potential energy is leftover from the Big Bang that kicked off our little Universe in the Multiverse and is the result of the decay of the Inflaton field that powers the expansion of the Multiverse. See The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis for more about the Inflaton field of the Multiverse. But unfortunately, we do not have access to cosmic amounts of gravitational potential energy. The only gravitational potential energy that we have access to comes in the form of hydroelectric power, and that gravitational potential energy really comes from seawater that was lifted into the clouds by the very dilute energy density of sunlight spread over large areas of the ocean.

The second most powerful form of energy in our Universe is nuclear energy - primarily in the form of fusion nuclear energy in the cores of stars. Fusion may come along someday for us as a useful source of energy, but we have been working on fusion energy for about 70 years now and it might take another 20 - 100 years to perfect, and we need something right now to replace carbon-based fuels! The physics of fusion is tough. You have to really squeeze protons together with high densities and high temperatures to make them fuse. For example, the core of our Sun has a tremendous density of 150 g/cm³ which makes it about 150 times denser than water and it has a temperature of 15.7 million degrees Kelvin. Yet the core of our Sun only produces about 275 watts/m³ of heat! Since the human body generates about 100 watts of heat and has a volume of about 0.1 cubic meters, that means the human body generates about 1,000 watts/m³, or about 3.6 times the heat production of the Sun's core! My wife uses a very small space heater on her bathroom sink top to heat the bathroom. It generates 1200 watts of heat. So my wife would need 4.36 cubic meters of the Sun's core to provide the same amount of heat and that would take up most of my half of the bathroom.

But the Universe has been kind. The Universe also contains another form of nuclear energy that remains largely untapped. That is because it requires Intelligence to unleash it. It is called fission nuclear energy. Certain very heavy nuclei like uranium-233, uranium-235, plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 can fission into lighter nuclei when hit with a neutron. When these nuclei fission, they split in half and the two halves fly apart at about 40% of the speed of light! That's a tremendous amount of kinetic energy that turns into heat as the fission products bounce around hitting other atoms. Additional energy is released as the fission products decay into lighter nuclei and give off gamma-rays and high-speed electrons.

Figure 1 - When a neutron hits a uranium-235 nucleus it can split it into two lighter nuclei like Ba-144 and Kr-89 that fly apart at about 40% of the speed of light and two or three additional neutrons. The nuclei that fly apart are called fission products that are very radioactive with half-lives of less than 30 years and need to be stored for about 300 years. The additional neutrons can then strike other uranium-235 nuclei, causing them to split as well. Some neutrons can also hit uranium-238 nuclei and turn them into plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 that can also fission when hit by a neutron.

Figure 2 – A ball of thorium or uranium smaller than a golf ball can fuel an American lifestyle for 100 years. This includes all of the electricity, heating, cooling, driving and flying that an American does in 100 years. We have already mined enough thorium and uranium to run the whole world for thousands of years. There is enough thorium and uranium on the Earth to run the world for hundreds of thousands of years.

Molten salt nuclear reactors burn the entire ball of uranium or thorium into fission products. Some of those fission products are valuable nuclei that can be used for medical or industrial purposes. Regardless of that, the generated fission products only need to be safely stored for 10 half-lives or 300 years until they become as radioactive as coal ash. And we already know how to safely store things for 300 years or more. We already have many buildings, books and paintings that have been carefully preserved for 300 years. But the current nuclear reactors that we are running only burn a few percent of the ball and then leave behind a radioactive ball that needs to be safely stored for 200,000 years until it decays to safe levels. For more on how modern advanced fission reactors work, see: Last Call for Carbon-Based Intelligence on Planet Earth.

It is now thought that these very precious heavy nuclei are created when orbiting neutron stars collide. Each neutron star is several miles in diameter and is essentially a very huge atomic nucleus composed of huge numbers of neutrons. As the two neutron stars orbit each other, they give off energy in the form of gravitational waves and begin to orbit closer and closer together as their orbital energy radiates away. They also orbit each other faster and faster to conserve angular momentum. Eventually, the two neutron stars collide like two giant balls of neutrons smashing together at a high velocity in a vast cosmic atom smasher. This allows some very heavy nuclei to form like uranium-235 uranium-238 and thorium-232. Plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 also form, but those nuclei have relatively short half-lives so they do not exist long enough to become incorporated into a new stellar planetary system. It is also thought that these very heavy nuclei are created by Type II supernovae when the cores of very massive stars collapse at the end of their lives. Fortunately for us, Nature squirrels away vast amounts of cosmic energy in these nuclei, just waiting for some form of Intelligence to come along and put them to good use. They are a form of unlimited limitless energy for any Intelligence smart enough to put them to good use.

Many Green New Deal Supporters Propose to Solve All of Our Problems with Lots of Solar Panels and Wind Turbines
But couldn't we just build lots of solar panels and wind turbines instead of using 4th-generation nuclear reactors? That would produce millions of high-paying jobs that could bring people out of poverty and into a thriving middle class like we had back in the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up. The problem is that both solar panels and wind turbines are driven by the very low-density energy of sunlight. Our Sun does give off lots of energy, but by the time sunlight reaches the top of the Earth's atmosphere it has dropped down to a value of 1370 Watts/m². That's about as much as my wife's space heater for every square meter. But lots of that energy gets reflected back into space by clouds and the atmosphere. Plus, you only get that 1370 Watts/m² for a surface that is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. During the night you get nothing and even during the daytime you only get a portion of it because your solar panels are tilted from being perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. So even if solar panels were 100% efficient, you would need lots of them to power the world.

But how about calculating an order of magnitude approximation? Lots of people use the "toe" unit of energy - the energy of one ton of oil equivalent. In gigawatt-hours that comes to:

1 toe = 11,630 KWh = 0.011630 GWh where KWh = KilloWattHour and GWh = GigaWattHour.

One Mtoe = 1 million toes.

In 2018, the world used 14,421 Mtoe = 167,716,230 GWh for the whole year. To find the average steady-state power usage of the world we need to divide by the number of hours in a year:

167,716,230 GWh / 24 / 365.25 = 19,132 GW which is about 20,000 GW

So the whole world needs the continuous output from about 20,000 one-GW power plants on average. That could be furnished by 80,000 modular 250 MW molten salt nuclear reactors, each about the size of a city bus, that could be built on assembly lines and would not need any storage infrastructure. The world currently has about 50,000 commercial aircraft in service so this is doable. Since 1/2 of the world is always in darkness and probably does not have enough wind either, let's say you need to continuously store and release about 10,000 GW of power for those down-times. That's a lot of rechargeable batteries.

For example, to just power America's Green New Deal with wind and solar power alone, Mike Conley and Tim Maloney used the numbers from the 132-page report of the environmental Solutions Project that requires 18 billion square meters of solar panels and 500,000 5 MW wind turbines to supply all of the energy needs of the United States. Mike and Tim point out that once all of this infrastructure has been constructed on 132,000 square miles of land, we will need to replace 1.23 million square meters of solar panels and 80 of the 5 MW wind turbines every day, forever, as the solar panels and wind turbines wear out. One idea in the Green New Deal is to create millions of high-paying jobs building the huge arrays of solar panels and wind turbines and additional high-paying jobs to maintain and replace large amounts of hardware as it wears out. There will also need to be a large number of jobs devoted to collecting and recycling the materials in worn-out solar panels and wind turbines. The benefit of millions and millions of high-paying jobs is that it will help to bring many people out of poverty and into the middle class. The problem is that it will also make solar and wind power very expensive.

Figure 3 – The new GE 5 MW wind turbine is 500 feet tall, about the height of a 50 story building. We will need 500,000 of them and will need to replace 80 of them each day as they wear out in the future.

Roadmap To Nowhere - The Myth of Powering the Nation With Renewable Energy
https://www.roadmaptonowhere.com/

In a sense, the Green New Deal would be moving millions and millions of people back to the soil to become sunshine farmers. That is because the energy density of sunshine is so very low and undependable. And wind power is just one step removed from sunshine farming because the wind is caused by the differential heating of the Earth's atmosphere by sunshine. Sunshine farming is subject to all of the same debilitating vagaries of traditional farming like too many cloudy or hot windless days. And like traditional farmers, sunshine farmers cannot work at night. On the other hand, a true Global Comprehensive Green New Deal would divert such potential sunshine farmers into building molten salt nuclear reactors, upgrading electrical grids, rebuilding infrastructure, converting transportation systems to electrical and hydrogen-based systems, building energy-efficient low-cost housing and insulating existing buildings. Investments in those activities would also create millions of high-paying jobs and would deliver more benefits than simply investing in sunshine farming.

Conclusion
Now don't get me wrong. I have been buying wind and solar-powered electricity for about 10 years now, only because they are better than electricity from coal-fired power plants. But if I could buy electricity from power plants run by molten salt nuclear reactors, I would definitely do that. But I cannot do that because there are no molten salt nuclear reactors generating electricity. This is where a Global Comprehensive Green New Deal comes in. We need the government of the United States of America to adopt a "Manhatten Project"-like Global Comprehensive Green New Deal to rapidly develop molten salt nuclear reactors and all of the necessary supply chain infrastructure to fuel them. Such a project would also help to attain all of the objectives of a solar and wind-based Green New Deal. Given an infinite amount of limitless energy that is far cheaper than coal, we can achieve all of the worthy objectives of the Green New Deal, and by further implementing the ideas of Andrew Yang, we can also overcome the challenges of the Software Singularity and the fast-approaching dramatic economic impacts of robotics and AI software. And I love the good intentions of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. For me, they bring back the hopes and aspirations of the 1960s for a better world. I just think that a little bit of physics and softwarephysics could be of help in achieving their goals.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston