Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

to Guest, John, and vinceate ---


The real problem with nuclear war is the evil wind ( fallout ) one can calculate how to take out an opponent, but one can't control the weather or where the fallout goes and what it destroys -- such as cropland, which can be contaminated for hundreds of years. -- reference, the Sumerian book of Enki.

I have a suspicion that the upper levels of the important governments around the world ( the nonpublic part ) are aware of the above, and therefore we haven't had WW3 yet, and may not have a nuclear war at all. A planet wide nuclear war can present problems that the powers that be ( they want to stay in power ) might prefer to avoid. Some of these issues are out lined in the above mentioned book.

You may recall that toward the end of the "Iraq war" there was the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, it contains /contained artifacts and tablets from ancient Sumeria. Many months later much of this was returned under the "protection" of the US. It has been rumored that these were studied by the "appropriate authorities" to gain need information.

Side note, Zecharia Sitchin a translator of ancient Sumerian writing predicated the color of Uranus and Neptune before the Voyager 2 images were received. The images verified his prediction based upon the ancient texts.

Make of it what you will.

psCargile wrote:

The computers I bought recently were about 1.8 Ghz and the ones I bought about 10 years ago were also. They are still increasing the number of transistors on a chip, so it is possible that Moore's Law is still working some. And GPUs are amazing. However, I am less sure the Singularity is coming soon than I used to be.

While the photolithography necessary to print larger and larger numbers of transistors on silicon continues to increase, albeit at a slower rate, but none the less the capacity in terms of transistors per device continues to increase. But understand the numbers are prodigious 20% of 5 million transistors is a million devices; whereas in the past 20% of 100 thousand devices was only 20 thousand transistors. The question remains, as it has remained for a very long time: what do you create with those new transistors. The maximum clock speed of silicon is close to being reached and is predicated upon the semiconductor physics - that is the reason that processor clock speeds have remained "stable" over the last 10 - 12 years, and are likely to change little in the immediate future. The processing units are now all horizontally microcoded with each clock tick performing at a minimum a single processor instruction and depending upon the incoming instruction stream may in fact execute multiple processor instructions on each clock cycle. Memory is still an area where some improvement can take place, but even that with multiple levels of caching, even that benefit is reaching the limits of what is possible - again physics. The result is that the days of seeing vast differences in performance between succeeding generations of processors are gone, you will see performance increases but they will be on the order of double digit percentages.

There is no equivalent of Moores's Law, nor has there ever been, for software development. And while semiconductor physics is the same for all silicon devices, the same isn't true for software development. Hardware engineers are continually creating new processors, so software engineers are having to continually reinvent the wheel (languages to be executed by those processors) for their newest Frankenstein (that would be processor if your a hardware engineer, and the software if your a SW guy). All processors are still stored program machines, each operating, as in the earliest days of stored program computers, from a physical instruction stream originating out of memory. At power on they come up "dumb", and need to be sent to a resident area of memory to execute read-only-memory programs that will, hopefully, be a coherent boot program that will load a significantly more complex program from secondary (disk) storage. For every "new" processor (processor de jour if you will) at some point early in the processor's development some poor grunt got saddled with doing the first code for their new "baby"; that "baby" whom everyone believes will become the world's next great gift. While hardware complexity has made for more complex instructions - high level or complex instructions - most of these high level additions to a processors instruction set are of an esoteric nature and of limited general value - that is they serve very specific niche applications. Everything is still, essentially, quantified in terms of the machine's instruction set, and its ability to process an instruction stream out of memory (either cache, or main memory). With a modest bit of change in languages software is still done the way - by hand - that it was done in the 1950s. When the Obamacare web site debacle was under discussion John noted a software development productivity number for programmers of 6 - 10 lines of code per day, that is a very old number and anyone who has written any appreciable amount of software will not argue too much with that number. That productivity hasn't changed too much, while the code is different, and that code may generate many many more executable machine instructions for each line of code, the productivity in terms of program lines of code generated per programmer per day hasn't changed all that much in the last 65 years. What has changed fairly dramatically is the number of people generating those 6 - 10 lines of code per day.

Much of the hardware/software development over the last 30 years has gone into fail-soft multiple processor systems who have the ability to run non-stop; systems that verify the hardware integrity of their elements on an almost continuous basis; including all elements being hot-swapable; additionally much effort has gone into very specific peripheral devices that are more significant, and more capable than prior devices. The question is, as it has always been, is how do you coordinate asynchronous operations from various and multiple asynchronous processing units and - whose in charge? The trade off is do we create high level high capability general processing units (cores) operating from serial operating system and application streams, or do we create an ever increasing number of limited targeted self-contained smart peripheral processors (GPUs). It is almost a revisit of the CISC vs RISC argument of yore. You can certainly do magnificent things with parallel processing elements to service a video screen, but somebody has to control what is fed to whom, from where, and when. The same might be said of networking stream processors. What is happening is that the level of complexity is going up very rapidly, and it is rising non linearly; looking at the finished system's level of complexity there are two temptations: 1.) the first is to be astounded that all the stuff cobbled together - some call it engineering - would work at all; and 2.) when viewing the system under consideration's remarkable flexibility, the temptation is to ask: "... is it alive?...does it get hungry, or go to lunch?"

The magic will be sentience - but is that possible? I don't know, perhaps one day, but I don't think that day is near. While I haven't been close to the semi industry for a while, for most of my adult life, the average product life was 18 - 24 months. What that translates to is a continually changing panorama, that is, an environment that is never stable long enough to do anything too enduring, or too do too much damage. That's a good and a bad thing; bad choices are left behind both HW and SW; new innovation is incorporated. When a machine is created that self generates those 6 - 10 lines of code 24/7 and can be directed in what it creates then everything has changed; then is the time to get scared. When that machine is given the capacity to perform its own developmental direction everything will be different. The magic will be sentience. When a stored program machine becomes self aware, should that ever happen, everything will change. When program bug fixes cease, and only enhancements become available, then is the time to start to worry.

Sorry!!!

The above should have been: vincecate wrote:

Thus my nom de guerre

John wrote:

vincecate wrote: If you think WW3 is about to start, why not get a telecommuting job and head for a remote location? If there is a nuclear war and huge population loss, would you not still want to be alive?

No.

I have seen other people who share your view but I do not really understand it. Why would you not? Do you think it will just be too miserable and depressing to cope with? John, do you have any kids? I would want to be around to try to help my kids. I also think that humanity will recover, even from a nuclear war. I think enough of human knowledge will never be lost, even in a nuclear war, that recovery will be fast. I also think the world spends far too much of the world economy on "government" and that will change, so growth will be much faster. Perhaps it is just an optimist vs pessimist thing.

Sitchen was no scholar of Sumerian language.

http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/

psCargile wrote:Sitchen was no scholar of Sumerian language.

http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/

Of course he has to be wrong. --- Still, there is the problem of all of those artifacts scattered around the world that we can't recreate or should not be. The "wailing wall" is an interesting example, when one looks at the parts, as I have, one gets the impression , written in stone, that humanity is in decline.

vincecate wrote:

John wrote:

vincecate wrote: If you think WW3 is about to start, why not get a telecommuting job and head for a remote location? If there is a nuclear war and huge population loss, would you not still want to be alive?

No.

I have seen other people who share your view but I do not really understand it. Why would you not? Do you think it will just be too miserable and depressing to cope with? John, do you have any kids? I would want to be around to try to help my kids. I also think that humanity will recover, even from a nuclear war. I think enough of human knowledge will never be lost, even in a nuclear war, that recovery will be fast. I also think the world spends far too much of the world economy on "government" and that will change, so growth will be much faster. Perhaps it is just an optimist vs pessimist thing.

I would not want to survive a nuclear war either. If there is a nuclear war, I want to be a ground zero with my family. Life after nuclear war would be misery on steroids.

On 7/3 Guest wrote:

I would not want to survive a nuclear war either. If there is a nuclear war, I want to be a ground zero with my family. Life after nuclear war would be misery on steroids.

Unfortunately or fortunately, as you may see it, none of use will get to choose. Preparing is what you do before you need it, not when or after you need it.

NoOneImportant wrote:On 7/3 Guest wrote:

I would not want to survive a nuclear war either. If there is a nuclear war, I want to be a ground zero with my family. Life after nuclear war would be misery on steroids.

Unfortunately or fortunately, as you may see it, none of use will get to choose. Preparing is what you do before you need it, not when or after you need it.

I am sure that the island I have chosen to live on, Anguilla, will not be ground zero. Population is about 13,000 and we don't trouble any other countries, so I really don't think anyone will be wasting a valuable ICBM on us. Our steady "trade winds" mean only ocean upwind for 3,000 miles, then the Sahara desert. So Anguilla will be a lower fallout location in the event on an all out war.

And vincecate wrote:

I am sure that the island I have chosen to live on, Anguilla, will not be ground zero. Population is about 13,000 and we don't trouble any other countries, so I really don't think anyone will be wasting a valuable ICBM on us. Our steady "trade winds" mean only ocean upwind for 3,000 miles, then the Sahara desert. So Anguilla will be a lower fallout location in the event on an all out war.

Sounds like paradise... no wait... how do they generate power, where does their fuel come from, where do they get their meds (antibiotics, inoculations, surgical supplies, etc,) , what sort of medical imaging is available, where do their X-ray films come from, where do their light bulbs come from, what about nails, and tools, do they use cars, what about gasoline, and car parts. Do they grow all their own food. While I can't know for sure, I am pretty sure that given a multi party nuclear exchange, no one will go unscathed - but you can prepare.

We're not just talking blast, heat, and fallout...we are talking about the abolition, or at the least the throwing of a considerable amount of sand into the gears of an integrated world wide economic structure that has evolved over the last 30 years. You may want to get a copy of Pitcaren's Island, it's the account of what the HMS Bounty survivors did on Pitcaren island after the mutiny - it re-enforces many of the GD contentions. If you're going to Anguilla be sure to take a boat and guns and ammo, and make it a sail boat, and you had better learn to navigate, to use a sextant, a magnetic compass, a good mechanical clock, and lots and lots of paper charts, and guns and ammo because much of the devastated coastlines of the world will be like, at least for a while, like the current coast of Somalia (full of pirates, people just trying to figure out a way to subsist). After the exchange... maybe GPS, maybe no.

I don't want to be Dr. Doom, but once you start to think through the problem it is daunting - you just can't know what will or won't be. As for Anguilla going unscathed? Where do you think those who have a boat are going to head when southern Florida is bathed a pile of radioactive ash? It's like those who live in a city who believe that they will just grab their gun and go out to the country, or into the forests to find sustenance - it just can't happen, we're talking about millions of people. Fallout will contaminate vast areas of, not just the land, but will poison the very food in the field itself. America has roughly 104 active nuclear power generating reactors. With the general loss of electrical power from a nuclear exchange, each nuclear power pant may be expected to become its own Fukashima. Each failed plant that has lost containment additionally will contaminate vast areas that surround those reactors. Palo Verdi ( west of Phoenix) alone, North America's largest active nuclear power generating site consists of 3 ea active 1.3 megawatt reactors; reactors that are totally cooled by wastewater; wastewater that is obtained from the city of Phoenix, and the surrounding area. And that waste water is solely delivered via electrical pumps.

My point is that we're talking daunting difficulties that only start with the initial nuclear exchange - start to think it through and the prospect is simply scary, should there ever be a general nuclear exchange, nobody is going to continue on with life as it was. But you can start to prepare, a little bit at a time. Think water, food, meds, shelter, and protection. The Mormons have been espousing self-sufficency for a very long time. While I am not a Mormon, a good idea, is a good idea regardless of where it comes from, and it only takes a small amount periodically set aside to provision for several months, or a year for a family of four - and you can eat the food.