Share Your Most Dangerous Idea 1060
GabrielF writes "Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask "What is your most dangerous idea?" The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond -- and that's just the D's! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial."
Similar piece from a year ago (Score:3, Interesting)
evolution of evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Sexuality is going to change (Score:2, Interesting)
What are /. reader's most dangerous ideas? (Score:2, Interesting)
My most dangerous idea: Asking
Humor aside, I am serious, let's make a list.
The Most Apt Response Out There (Score:5, Interesting)
DANIEL GILBERT
Psychologist, Harvard University
The idea that ideas can be dangerous
Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
Well, Dan, have you read Slashdot lately? I think we're still all right. For now.
Lots of buzzword babble (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Most Dangerous Idea of All (Score:1, Interesting)
What the..? Emotional Intelligence? (Score:2, Interesting)
Emotional intelligence is not a dangerous idea, merely an expression of maturity without reguard to scholarly learning, as many intellectual elitists are fucking keen on to operate without maturity whatsoever. I believe the notion behind it is that actual ethical good trumps academic research, as academic research is completely fruitless without the purpose to better the lives of the people of the world.
Let me simplify my thoughts: Who is the better man, a simpleton who emulates Ghandi based on emotional intuition, or someone who sharpens his intellect to the point of brilliance if only to raise himself in the world?
OK, here's one. "Alcohol Economy". (Score:5, Interesting)
We have an entire Midwest full of Great Plains which are very well suited to growing grains which could produce alcohol.
It has been demonstrated that you can run a car on alcohol. Dragsters do it all the time.
It has been demonstrated that a fuel cell can generate electricity from methanol.
Alcohol doesn't poison the environment if you spill some. It burns clean if you have a darwinian-selection moment and light it up. And in a pinch, you can drink it. Try THAT with petroleum.
Well? Wouldn't an alcohol economy be easier than a hydrogen one?
Just a thought...
No (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, there MAY be a way to use a BEC more destructively. If you have a BEC that consists of pure deuterium, use magnetic containment to prevent the BEC from expanding back out at all, raise the temperature as close to instantaneously as possible to the point where fusion can occur...
The BEC obviously can't remain a BEC at superhigh temperatures, so must unfold to some degree. The structure is guaranteed to move to the lowest possible energy state, because that is what atomic structures do. This is part of why it would be important to raise the temperature rapidly. You want it so that there simply is no valid state with deuterium nucleii.
If deuterium is simply not an option, the nucleii will fuse. They have no alternative. Here is where it gets fun, though. If the energies are high enough and the compression great enough, you can produce elements as far up the periodic table as you like. Unlike normal particle accelerator efforts to produce super-massive atoms, these will actually last for a while - there won't be room for them to fall apart.
The difficulty in producing the correct conditions would be enormous, but if you could crack that nut, there'd be no theoretical reason why you couldn't push for a nucleus with an atomic mass of a thousand or so.
The energy to produce such a monster atom would be guaranteed much greater than ALL of the energy output by the fusion reactions. (Iron takes more energy to fuse than it gives out and we're talking something a couple of orders of magnitude larger.) Sustaining it might even be worse.
The fun part, though, will be in letting it collapse after a time. A very substantial part of the energy put into the fusion of the nucleii would be released in a matter of microseconds over an extremely small space. Current physics predicts that if you exceed a certain energy density, space will "inflate". This might cause the whole of space/time to explode, it might form a pocket universe, or it might do all sorts of other strange things. Nobody knows much about energy densities of that magnitude.
yea us? (Score:3, Interesting)
"The relative innocence and stable period of the last 50 years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn't haphazard testosterone driven riots, where they cannibalize their own neighborhood, much like in L.A. in the 80s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy ? What if Slashdotters start musing aloud about "Gee, the L.A. water supply is rather simplistic, isn't it?" An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition ? Hacking L.A. may be a lot easier than hacking IE."
Stolen from Star Trek (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A radical idea - Fredom Matters Most (Score:2, Interesting)
It's always nice when someone new walks into a process that's been going on for hundreds of years and gets angry that no one sees his simple solution, even though that's where we started and we've been fixing the problems with it ever since.
Yup. I knew it would be too radical for people to handle.
They're too busy talking about the financial freedom lost when you have a work force of illiterates who can't add.
Yup. The notion that people might actually become educated without the government coercing it on everyone - I told you, it is simply too radical for people to handle.
And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.
Boy, I sure hit the nail on the head. After all, who could ever possibly accept the notion that millions won't die unless the government coerces people to pay for retirement and health care. Yes, it is truely too radical to handle.
Genius! How could that possibly go bad? Combine this with your no-free-schooling idea and we've got ourselves a plan that just might solve everybody's problem.
I can see now, that my idea was truely too dangerous. Clearly modding to minus infinity doesn't provide society enough safety. I think you need to have /. trace my IP, to my ISP, and have my ISP trace to my home address so that experts may be hired to rip my toung out, cut off my typing hands, and gouge my peanus out of it's socket to ensure that I can no longer promote such radical ideas or reproduce. Thank you.
I don't think this is funny... (Score:1, Interesting)
I've come to the conclusion that terrorists are either very dumb or they are too busy to attack us right now or they are saving up for the next big attack.
Morbid, I know. Scary too.
Re:Mmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
When they said "dangerous", I didn't instinctively think "socially dangerous". I thought "wiping out large numbers of species, potentially including humans"-dangerous.
The problem isn't really Oil (Score:5, Interesting)
Replacing oil with alcohol would not solve our problems.
Sure, it would invest in agriculture rather than exploiting technology to find, extract and refine crude oil. But It would replace the known problems associated with enriching arab states with a history of bad civil rights, with some unknown problems related to a huge mega-farm raising a monoculture crop. Pesticides, GMO, soil depletion are issues we know would be involved, but what else is involved with monobreed farming on that scale?
There's also the problem that American bio-energy fuel production could only generate a 10th of the fuel supply that the USA currently uses - and that's only gasoline. There are lots of products we get from crude oil that we can't press out of biomass: think about plastics, asphalt, lubricants.
Then there's the issue of what we're fueling in the first place: the realized dream of cheap fuel for vehicle freedom has resulted in a transportation engineering crisis that requires moving around and storing enormous cars rather than people. That creates sprawl that eats up farmland so we can have a parking lot around WalMart and sprawling acres of land devoted to roadways, driveways and freeways to link far flung suburban housing developments and equally sprawling office parks, and the previously mentioned WalMarts. Not to mention vehicle's polluting of the the environment.
And yes you can drink alcohol, but not the 85% Ethanol/15% Gasoline mix we create for cars. It also is only about 30% cleaner than burning raw gasoline, so you might not want to light up indoors. It's also significantly more expensive, even if you ignore the farming subsidies that artificially cheapen it.
Sometimes the simplest solution is also the least well thought out.
I would suggest determining the real problems before offering a solution. A nation designed around cars instead of people is definitely part of the problem, and alternative fuel doesn't solve that particular problem at all.
Nuclear Economy (Score:5, Interesting)
Forgo alcohol/biodiesel.
Switch to a large number of Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactors [wikipedia.org] like China is doing, and use this energy to run run cars on Hydrogen or electricity.
Believe it or not, Nuclear power is actually CLEANER ounce per ounce than most other energy methods (Try comparing it to coal, for example, which is still currently used, or many other things.) However, most people are scared of it, because they dont understand it.
For those about to reply OMG! Nuclear power ZOMG!!!111!!11One!!! You should perhaps read the wikipedia article.
human ideas only matter on earth (Score:3, Interesting)
Modern science is a product of biology (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow. Only a psychologist would come up with an idea like this. It's clearly a straw-man argument. The simpler version we've all heard for years: if a tree falls in the forest and noone is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is of course it does. The weight of the tree crashing against the ground via the force of gravity sends a shockwave through the air. Whether or not a person is in range of the shockwave is completely irrelevant.
This is the highest form of hubris: it takes people/intelligence for quantifications to have meaning. Bullshit.
Take a universe exactly like ours in every respect with the very minor alteration that life never got started on earth. Well guess what? It still takes a minimum threshold of matter to condense and form a burning star. The label we've given to that threshold is nothing; a mere convienience. The real important fact is that matter *can* condense into a burning star, and it will do so even if there's no humans around to pontificate.
End rant.
Re:The Most Dangerous Idea of All (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that in itself says nothing about it being required or useful in the modern day (or counterproductive). However, one of the above has been replaced with science and the other isn't required (atheists aren't all moraless bastards).
Re:A radical idea - Fredom Matters Most (Score:5, Interesting)
Somalia has a free market economy with everything privatised, and no government - freedom for all. Let's see how it stacks up:
In monitary policy - everyone seems to think that other measures of inflation and growth are more important, than the freedom from controll that the gold standard offers.
Well there is no real central bank for Somalia anymore as far as I can find, and due to counterfeiting and other problems the Somali currency was so seriously debased that they may as well be using gold instead and use the gol standard.
In public education - everyone talks about what kind of education the kids need, and noone talks about the financial freedom lost in paying for it, or the very influence that such has on the kids.
All education in Somalia is private. It's a free market economy with no government. We get a big check for this one.
In social security and medicade/ medical care - everyones worried about how will we take care of the needy and elderly and noone talks about the people that need to be financially coerced to make these systems work.
There is no government so there is certainly no social security of medicare equivalent. At worst there is a certain amount of foreign aid and World Bank assistance, but I think that counts as outside charity. A big check for this one too.
In copyrights and patents - everyone talks about the poor starving inventor or creator, and noone talks about all the people that need to be coerced to make these systems of incentive work.
We're perfectly good for this one - there is no government of court system to enforce any such thing. A big check here too.
In the genocide of the poor - noone would even dare mention that the best solution would be to arm them and seciure their right to bear arms first.
Wow. That's just what Somalia is! A free for all where anyone at all can arm themselves and take part. Sounds perfect.
And from elsewhere...I'm sorry for responding to my own post, but no argument about freedom would be complete without mentioning the "war on drugs".
A big check for this one too! Somalia seems to have everything you're looking for. No government coercion, just freedom for everyone and a truly free market economy. The imminent arrival of Somalia as a significant player on the world economic stage seems inevitable given it's almost utopian society. It's been without government for 15 years now, but I'm sure Somalia will well and truly be on it's feet any year now. I expect you'll be moving there, given it's fulfillment of your radical dream, very soon, so perhaps you cna help really get the economy moving.
Jedidiah.
Re:ooh, ooh! pick me! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite.
I personally suspect that if the Internet replaces aspects of government, it'll be by facilitating assurance contracts [wikipedia.org] between individuals. Sites like fundable.org [fundable.org] and PledgeBank [pledgebank.com] are some early implementations, allowing people to more effectively pool resources in pursuit of a common goal.
Couple good internet-based implementations of assurance contract brokerages with prediction markets [wikipedia.org] and/or decision markets, and I suspect the results should be pretty formidable. Such a system would likely be able to accomplish much of what is currently delegated to government.
Re:My Humble Submissions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
Over the billions of years the universe has existed, thousands of alien cultures have evolved just like ours, only to have there planet blipped out of existance by an accidential scientific discovery.
If such a case possible then any "advanced" society is constantly on the brink of destruction, by attempting to control higher and higher energies. We may think nuclear weapons are dangerous (and they are), an alien kids home science Supernova kit could wield chaos on a galatic scale.
In the end, we are all dead anyway, weather we cook our planet with global warming, a comet smashes us to bits, nano bots turn us go grey goo, or our sun expands to a red giant. At some point thermodynamics wins.
Hmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a bit like taking liquid hydrogen and exerting enough pressure on it to turn it into solid metal. The temperature technically goes up, but it can't remain liquid or convert to a gas because the volume is too small. The most stable state it can enter is a "high-temperature" solid.
In this case, what we're doing is compressing a BEC "superatom" to a temperature in which it can no longer remain a BEC, but it cannot revert to deuterium atoms either. Neither is stable, under the conditions imposed. The only alternative is for the nuclei to fuse together, because it is the only valid way left that they can reduce the space requirements to what they have.
You'd need to be a little careful, though. You don't want to leave any nuclei with no valid state, or you're going to squish the lot into a quark-gluon soup. Again, that could be nasty, as I'm not sure you can magnetically contain the gluons... which ARE going to react with the containment system.
That is not the original meaning of agnostic (Score:3, Interesting)
It is right there in the word: "a-gnostic", where gnostic refers to knowledge, and agnostic refers to the lack of it.
Nowadays, "agnosticism" is often taken to mean declaring a lack of _belief_ either way - and here "belief" refers to "have faith in", not "known to be true beyond doubt". (The word "belief" is itself confusing, because different people take it to mean different things, or even the same people in different contexts, without making those differences plain).
My guess is that this change in the word "agnostic" over time makes sense as more and more people, including devout religious people and atheists, analyse their beliefs to the degree that they accept their knowledge is not absolute, but they have faith or commit to following the implications of their beliefs anyway. In a sense, the original idea "agnostic" has become more widespread, so the word isn't used for that so much now.
The upshot is that "agnostic" does _not_ mean "atheist" in another guise. Because an atheist puts his/her belief (as in motivation/faith) in "there is no god". That is different from the agnostic's belief (as in motivation/faith): "I don't know if there is god" - the latter being more intellectually honest for many people. Some agnostics put their faith in god while acknowledging they don't know if god exists. That is intellectually honest for some meanings of the word "faith", but not others. A genuine atheist would not do that.
I admit the above explanation is a little messy, because I don't define the terms very well, and it's been a while since I thought about the topic. Sorry; I'm tired. The points are valid, but not so well explained in the above. Study theories of knowledge - epistemology - to gain clearer insights into the range of meanings assigned to the terms like "belief" and "know".
-- Jamie
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
What is Dangerous? (Score:2, Interesting)
A more interesting interpretation is an idea you _hope_ is false but are afraid might be true. I would suggest the following as a dangerous idea: the benefits of liberal democracy are wholly dependent on the immoral economic exploitation of the third world and the unsustainable exploitation of limited planetary resources.
I certainly hope it's false. I would like to believe that the prosperity of the West could be exported to the rest of the world and we could all live happily ever after. But I have this nagging, nasty fear that it's all a short-lived dream based on turning a blind-eye to ruthless economic imperialism and the laws of science.
"Mere animal" (Score:3, Interesting)
The fundies demanding special treatment for human beings in these posts have obviously never closely observed another reasonably advanced mammalian species. Our spaniel has a well developed sense of right and wrong and you can easily see the debate ranging in his little mind as he wonders whether he can or should do something he is not allowed to do but wants to. In a small compass he displays much of the typical human behaviour - you can see the roots of religion, society and inquisitiveness.
Unfortunately there is a sequence of ideas here with an evil end. "Mere animals" - "humans who aren't like me so are mere animals" - "it's OK to kill people who aren't like me because they are just animals." You find this thinking wherever you find fundamentalist Semitic religions (mainly Christianity and Islam- this is nothing to do with being Jewish), whereas many Eastern religions are less likely to suffer from this anthroposupremacist error.
Dawkins Letter (Score:2, Interesting)
Just another bit of proof that scientists generally suck at philosophy.
gotta love those nutty libertarians! (Score:2, Interesting)
The trouble is that the solution people offer to inequity is usually what caused the problem in the first place.
ok so let me guess... it's government, right! the old 'drown it in the bathtub' boogeyman. distribution of equity is _definitely_ the governments fault. bad government! bad! we surely shouldn't blame generation after generation of capital holders bleeding the GDP of the nation and gaining a greater and greater percentage of total wealth that has left the expanding population with less and less to go around, how should we?.
in the 70's wages was 70% of received GDP... now it's under %50. less money is being paid to more people while rich individuals and corporations further consolidate (and don't spend!) their wealth. governments, in general, spend in ways to reduce this inequality - e.g. social security. i can say that private capitalists are rapacious misers, and that eric raymond is a racist gun nut; and in the end me calling people names is just as childish as you crying tinfoil tears at the government.
hey, who needs causality! I can say 'dogs + chili = economics' but trying to pass it off as cause+effect is nonsense. at the very least, how about some evidential proof of a correlation?
the idea of the state (should be) to foster administration of the wider community for the good of all. the state should be as decentralized as possible; local community leaders should be invested with as much power as possible to determine their own affairs and the (incredibly difficult) job of prioritising the allocation of monies should be determined by a safeguarded, corruption-resistant regime - we call it the beauracracy. most public servants i have met are stout personalities with a sense of due diligence, fairness and social responsibilty. and yes the rest were slackers but the rate has been signicantly less than my experience in prviate organisations, where the majority (more name-calling) are greedy, self-centred ingrates.
If you truly want equality, then you would support decentralization of power, and the reduction and/or elimination of the state. Inequality comes from violence...
decentralization of power=decentralized state. you know, city councils, first responders, utility managers; those awful people who do nothing for us. how about your local social security office, rape crisis centre, orphanage, school. we surely don't need any of _those_ now do we. and we surely shouldn't have rigid protections and assurances of these services via.. wait for it... _government_, now should we?
further decentralization comes from _expansion_ of the state; tribal/cultural leaders, church deacons, scout troops, little leaguers, big sister/brother etc. funding these and similar programs in order to foster them in communities which lack them will give more and more power to _local_ people to make a positive change in their _local_ communities.
and yes it costs more in taxes - so what? is it better that bill gates pays less tax so he can buy him and ballmer a double-headed dildo made of interleaved gold? or is it better that the money raised be given to social workers to help disadvantaged kids and battered women escape their nightmare existences?
oh no! I'm in america! i'm super rich in comparision to everyone in the world! even my poor, poor neighbor earns more than an african villiage! i have unlimited opportunities thanks to my business leaders raping and pillaging the natural resources and labour of poor peoples around the globe! and oh my god i have the lowest income tax rates in the OECD! how _dare_ they take my money from me! they are a wasteful, wasteful, evil beauracracy! excuse me while i drive my three ton truck to the woods so i can shoot near-extinct animals with my lovingly oiled fantasy
Re:Here is one they won't ever implement (Score:4, Interesting)
A thought that weighed heavily on Shakespeare's mind, among many others, were the things that are universal, the things that do bind us as equals. Life and death.
Choice! Aye there is the rub. We do not choose the manner of our birth nor (for the most part) our death. I think it was Adam Johnson who first linked this concept with that of equality. The analogy of birth was taking all the characteristics of humanity; our personality, our physicality, our experiences, our potential and our opportunities and putting them in a opaque bag which, once shuffled, would be redistributed at birth. With this is mind, now design a society, a government, an economy and a culture around this limitation. With this in mind, design how you would wish to live and what kind of world you would want passed on to your descendants.
This is the only way I have been able to retain my sanity and hold the apparently mutually exclusive concepts of 'there is no equality' and 'striving for equality is noble' as both true.
And I applaud this article, because I have long believed that the most dangerous of all things is thought.
Re:Sexuality is going to change (Score:4, Interesting)
But that doesn't tell us whether the bi-curious settle because society treats them better for doing that... or if they settle because they finally discover their "innate" sexual orientation...
Certainly, I have met a relatively large proportion of people who identify as bi, who complain that both the hetero world, and the homo world (i.e. gay friendly environments), often reject or dismiss bisexuals as somehow fence-sitters, or undecided, or likely to change and therefore dump their partner, or are traitors, or something.
Unfortunately, those compaints are consistent with the theory that people who settle into one of the homo/hetero orientations may be doing it because that's more socially comfortable. It doesn't prove the theory, but it supports it's plausibility.
I wonder what people would do, in a society where they are encouraged to be sexual in whatever way they enjoy each day... rather than trying to please other people or stay out of trouble.
Perhaps the next 50 years will gives us some clue.
-- Jamie
Hamlet II, ii (Score:3, Interesting)
--From Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117ish)
Most of the people who are, or will argue with you will likely cite art, and the appreciation of abstract beauty in their proofs. For me, I'd include those, and also that it is what I want to believe.
Why are you attached to the idea of setting us so low?
Re:The Most Dangerous Idea of All (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically correctly? Surely you don't agree with them that white people aren't human?
Re:Nuclear Economy (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm all for nuclear power but, please, make giant super-sites with 20 huge reactors far from population centers that can be efficiently secured and guarded and where economies of scale can allow maintainance and monitoring to be top-notch and yet still cost less. And build an airforce base next to it (or it next to a base) to provide full military defense capabilites.
It's worth the extra 10% or so transmission loss to centralize reactors.
Atheism is not the lack of religion (Score:3, Interesting)
Like 99.9% of slashdot's denizens, you've equated religion with a small subset of religion (although hopefully you are not also equating religion with fundamentist Xianity, or making the even worse mistake of redefining the nature of religion to suit American cultural biases).
Talk to a non-murtipujak Jain, or a Zen Bhuddist, or a Unitarian Universalist. Belief in deity is not required in any of those religions. Although belief in coffee is generally a UU requirement.
Re:evolution of evil (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:evolution of evil (Score:2, Interesting)
Economic subjugation comes not from violence alone (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily. Instead, you get many competing violent authorities who pile up a lot of bodies fulfilling the natural human desires to get higher in the pecking order until peace is established by one of them becoming the single giant, centralized authority.
Of course, this is technically a straw man argument about anarchy since you haven't truly argued for statelessness, but constant references to violence in minarchist arguments tend to lead one to the natural assumption that you are arguing against any sort of government violence against the people instead of just the law standing behind the tax collectors.
In a minarchist's perfect world, government only exists to keep men from pursuing direct violence against one another and from misappropriating legally owned private property. This world in and of itself does not guarantee utopia. It all rests on one assumption which you voice right here:
Inequality comes from violence... it comes from situations where people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves and instead are forced to do something under the threat of violence.
Not always. Sometimes people are forced to do things to avoid starvation or lesser problems. The only reason we have a market for menial labor is because it is the only way that uneducated people can feed and clothes themselves and their children. You need to read "Nickled and Dimed" to see how desperate the situation is for the working majority of poor people. There honestly isn't a lot of freedom when you don't have enough money to put down the first month's rent for an apartment and have to instead take the more expensive and less secure option of renting week-to-week at a motel. You can't take time off from work to go to the doctor (even if you could afford it) because you wouldn't earn enough money to feed yourself. You won't tell a cruel boss to shove it and go look for a new job because you don't have the money to survive multiple weeks of unemployment. You can't afford to take time off to retrain and get better skills because you;re working 11-15 hours a day on multiple jobs.
These people already are economically subjugated but not by government. They're subjugated by a largely distributed private sector instead of a centralized government. They don't have opportunities because opportunity requires the ability to have a period of self-sufficiency and free time that aren't available to people in their economic state. Without government or enough private charity funding (which would probably indicate enough of a public sentiment to have government handle it), these people would have no future. If you took away public education, social security, and medicare & medicaid, they wouldn't received back nearly enough taxes to make up the difference to pay for these essential services themselves. Without labor laws, unemployment laws, the minimum wage (which has already atrophied almost to the point of uselessness thanks to inflation), these people would be little more than slaves with the ability to choose their master.
It doesn't take violence to grind away a person's spirit and to make them a slave. The callous apathy of society at large and financial desperation are more than enough. I remember from History what the so-called "Gilded Age" was like, and I personally don't want to see a return of those days when the only law of business was that of the contract and the life of labor was cheap and expendable.
Re:Nuclear Economy (Score:3, Interesting)
But alcohol could be a useful addition to that. You could use methanol to fuel personal electronics (instead of batteries, which don't give you much bang for your buck and which are difficult to dispose of cleanly). You could also use it as combustion-engine fuel.
There are a lot of pieces that can go into this type of puzzle. There's wave power, the thermal convection concept they just posted a separate story about, wind power...
They all work, and there's no reason they can't all work together.
Re:Nuclear Economy (Score:3, Interesting)