Will the internet survive energy contraction?

Weak Kitten said:
Had a friend who the dice hated. He ended up having to play a druid with 6 INT. Said druid was last seen chasing after a bear yelling, "Come back bear! Don't you want to be my friend?" It became a running gag and the poor guy was allowed to roll up a new character.

Sadly, you can't roll up a new character in real life.
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Heh.

We shoudl start a "Role-Playing Stories" thread in community. One of my favorite characters was a female elf mage/thief. She was true Neutral, nto in the sense of "balance" that so many players get stuck on but in the sense of "I don't care about law, chaos, good, or evil, what's best for me". A memeorable example of her character was in one adventure when we were exploring the tomb of a renowned wizard, looking for some artifact or other. One of the rooms had a murky pool. I borrowed our Wizard's staff to probe the bottom of the pool, then handed it back. AS soon as he took it I turned to the DM..."so what happened to him when he grabbed the wet end of the staff?" :)
 
Not my favorite campaign/adventure, but probably favorite game moment. It was at an RPG convention, so we were playing one-use characters in a standalone adventure. We start out stripped of all equipment and imprisoned in an orc dungeon, with orcs getting ready to prepare dinner (us). Each of us is in a separate cell with iron bars. On of the characters is a half-ogre fighter with stats you would expect from a half-ogre. My character (human monk) shouts the half-ogre's name to get his attention, then yells "If you don't break this door, you will NEVER EAT AGAIN!".

Everyone cracked up, the DM rolled a few dice, then turned to the guy playing the half-ogre: "You just ripped the cell door off its hinges".

The rest of that adventure was almost as good.
 
Wouldn't burning sand get you silicon, and from that computer chips and solar panels?
 
PixyMisa said:
Not a chance. A paper notebook would contain vastly less information and be vastly less useful than even a small wiki. A single cheap memory card or optical disk can hold the text of a hundred thousand books. You have no conception of what you are throwing away.
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Why would you need that much information for a small village?

PixyMisa said:
What he describes involves the deaths of upwards of six billion people. Thanks, but I'll pass.
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Actually he doesn't think a die off will emerge. I think he's too optimistic though.


PixyMisa said:
That's not true either. It's pretty easy to design a simple CPU, and easy to manufacture one. People do it as a hobby.
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Really? Who?

PixyMisa said:
On top of that, over ten billion CPUs and MCUs are sold every year, and the number is growing rapidly even as the price is falling. The things are everywhere. I have dozens of them sitting in a box waiting to be built into projects that are never likely to happen. My brother, who designs custom microcontroller systems for a living, has hundreds of them.
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Yeah but they'd be useless.


PixyMisa said:
That peaceful transition is a fairy tale. A shift to an agrarian society - without post-Singularity technology hiding in the background - would mean the death of something like 90% of the human population of the planet.
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It won't be peaceful, I know.

PixyMisa said:
Tough bickies for you and the "ArchDruid". We live in a world of abundance. There's solar energy everywhere. There's uranium to last us a million years. Oil is running out, true, but due to the hard work of engineers and scientists focused on solving problems, that problem is being solved.
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Ok
 
Um...

Kerosene? You sure?

You do realize that you're trying to tell us there will be no oil left in two years, but you're going to have kerosene to burn?

You have pretty well confirmed yourself ignorant of the subject on which you speak. Thanks for playing, though.
 
Hellbound said:
Um...

Kerosene? You sure?

You do realize that you're trying to tell us there will be no oil left in two years, but you're going to have kerosene to burn?

You have pretty well confirmed yourself ignorant of the subject on which you speak. Thanks for playing, though.
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Um, I never said there'd not be any oil left. I said there won't be enough to power industrial civilization. There's a difference.

Some of the Amish use kerosene. You don't need a whole lot for minimal burning/power applications. There'll be enough for pre industrial uses. Also plenty of wood, cadavers (human and animal alike) among other sources.
 
TFian said:
Why would you need that much information for a small village?
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Because the villagers need to learn how to make solar-powered turbines and compressors for their refrigerators. We can put hundreds of thousands of technical manuals onto a single pen drive that costs less than $10, along with our copy of the Brittanica

Really? Who?
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The sort of nerd-minded people who would have been ham radio operators fifty years ago.


Yeah but they'd be useless.
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Why? The amount of power it takes to run a microcomputer can be generated by a lemon with two wires in it!


Again, you're simply making unsupported assertions, and ignoring what you're being told by genuine experts in the field.
 
TFian said:
You don't need a whole lot for minimal burning/power applications. There'll be enough for pre industrial uses.
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THis would be true, once the 90% of the population currently supported by that industrial society has died off when we all "go green".

By the way, everyone here is still waiting for any actual evidence of any of your supositions and opinions. You know, numbers, calculations, sources (besides one biased source working FAR outside his field of expertise).

Your entire argument so far boils down to repetions of "Is too!", "Is not!", and "The ArchDruid Says So!". It's tiresome.
 
TFian said:
Oh really? When and how?
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Well, the last time I met Woz was in the late 1990s, and he was designing them the way he had been designing them in the 1970s. Figuring out what components would be needed to do what he wanted, and laying out circuits to do it.

Granted, he was using computer-based design tools instead of drawing them on paper like he did in 1975, but the principle is pretty much the same. Are you seriously disputing that Woz exists?
 
TFian said:
Um, I never said there'd not be any oil left. I said there won't be enough to power industrial civilization. There's a difference.
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You still haven't made any case against renewables and nuclear power (or something else yet to be invented) being able to support the grid by the time oil becomes scarce. Other than ArchKook's word, which holds about as much water as a bucket with the bottom cut out of it.
 
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