France, And Europe, Vicious Downward Tech Spiral. Stopped By Anti-Hero Putin?

Consecutively to being the successor of Rome, and outlawing slavery in 657 CE, under queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, France, Francia, became the technological leader of the world. When one has no slaves, one needs ideas to build machines…

Most of the leading techs of the last 15 centuries were launched in France or by French inventors (contrarily to insulting myths of other jealous nations). Harvesters, labor horses, beans, hydraulic forges, Gothic architecture, field guns, in the Middle Ages; steam engine and steam boat (Denis Papin circa 1700 CE), cars, hot air balloons, master weaver in 18th-century Lyon, France, Jean-Charles Jacquard invented the programmable mechanical loom in 1804, photography (Niépce 1822, Daguerre 1837). motorized planes (Clement Ader, years before the US), internal combustion gasoline engine, nuclear power program for nukes, January 1938; transistors mass produced for high speed railroads just before their US “invention”, Kastler’s optical pumping, 1953, ramjet, computer chip, smart card (Roland Moreno, 1974), Giant Magneto Resistance (Nobel laureate Albert Fert, 1990s)…

However in recent times, European states, led by France, and in particular French woke political correctness infused with ecological hypocrisy and plutocratic manipulations, have doubled social spending (since 1980; especially for illegal immigrants of the Islamist persuasion)… and practiced a policy of deintellectualization and deindustrialization which has led to a catastrophic shrinkage of French technological leadership.. which is now just a shadow of its former self. These policies were akin to high treason, and how exactly they originated and the role of the Kremlin in them, has to be explored. For some reason, France, instead of getting her energy in France, got it from making Putin and Siberia wealthy. Now the energy tends to come from feudal friendly Qatar and distant Wyoming cowboys. That’s “ecology” and impoverishment, French style.

Yet France has nuclear forces indigenously developed and independent of the USA, the only such case in the West (UK nuclear forces are a hardware and software subsidiary of the US; a UK general said the UK could hold around a month without the US… no more…). French nuclear forces are also state of the art, and sometimes more advanced than their US equivalents. French anaerobic submarines are the best in the world (and French nuclear subs use some of their electric equipment to be the most silent… by shutting down their nuclear reactor and going all electric…).

The French are slowly getting conscious of their present state of increasing degeneracy and are starting to take measures to counteract it. This means an increasingly adversarial confrontation with the rest of the European machinery, which seems to have started, and is absolutely necessary. At this point, 2024, Europe can’t even launch a satellite, although New Zealand, North Korea and Iran can…

Things are improving, as the Vice President of the Russian Assembly, excited by French weapons and advisers in Ukraine, threatened to nuke Paris (March 2024). France replied in one sentence that she could defend herself. France helps Ukraine with some of the most sophisticated weapons in the world (CAESAR guns, SCALP AI cruise missile and Aster 30 anti-ballistic missiles… more coming, hopefully…) France was the world’s second exporter of weapons in 2023, behind her creation, the USA, and selling massive numbers of excellent French weapons is the imperial road to reindustrialization… and also survival...

Civilization is ever more technological, or is not. And civilization is stable only if it is technologically superior. France, and Europe forgot this in recent years.

Mechanical harvester pushed by donkey on the right, Gaul, Gallia, 2,000 years ago. Some were much larger and pushed by oxen teams. Those were not used in Italy, which had giant latifundia with armies of slaves…

Rome Collapsed Technologically Starting In 100 CE (Fall of Rome part XI)

In the Fourth Century, Rome became farce and tragedy:

Early in the 4th century, emperor Constantine, inventor of “Orthodox Catholicism” killed all the priests of Egypt… because the existence of the guardians of a religion which was more than 2,000 years old “hurt his feelings“. Christianism was an excellent excuse for the tyranny which ruled Rome to become murderously insane.

The military collapse of Rome can be dated exactly to the invasion of Italy in Spring 395 CE. That was no surprise: in an act of divinely inspired criminal idiocy the Occidental Roman army led by the Frank Arbogastes, had been destroyed in September 394 CE, by fanatical Catholic Theodosius I and his Goths led by their king Alaric. So of course there was no one left to protect the West. On January 17, 395 CE, Theodosius, age 48, dies, and his ally Alaric declares he has no more treaty with the Romans and declares war on Rome and Constantinople, invading Thrace and Greece, including the Peloponnese. Stilicho is a half Vandal who had been nominated protector of the children of Theodosius, and head of the Roman military in Occident. Stilicho counterattacks from Milan, bottles down Alaric…. so Pretorian Prefect Rufinus in Constantinople makes Alaric (!) generallissimo of what he just ravaged and orders Stilicho out. To keep on with the absurdity, Rufinus is assassinated by other Goths, Stilicho executed from jealousy, and Alaric seizes the city of Rome in 410 CE. With the details the situation becomes even more delirious. Emperor Arcadius in 395, formally succeeds is father, but marries Aelia Eudoxa who becomes one of the more powerful empresses, Augusta and dominates her husband. She is the daughter of  Flavius Bauto, a Romanised Frank who served as magister militum in the Western Roman army during the 380s… Who had become Consul, but died, and was succeeded in his military office by Arbogastes… who was claimed by John of Antioch to be Bauto’s son… The late Roman empire was an incomparable mess which makes Game of Thrones look simplistic and much more realistic.

Meanwhile, in 406 CE, the Franks, put in charge of the northern frontier by their enemies the ruling bishops and founding fathers of Catholicism… after successfully raiding the Germans in Germania, got surprised by the suddenly frozen Rhine, and were unable to hold the barbarians who galloped across the Rhine, and flooded Gallia, Iberia and soon after… Africa. The invasion had become a tsunami of Germans and even Iranians (Alans).

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Rome lost control of its destiny by 100 CE:

Indeed, the technical problems of Rome started at least three centuries earlier, when Rome’s metal usage collapsed. That drastic collapse has been known for a while, from lead pollution in Greenland ice. Romans used lead everywhere (in pipes limestone deposits would prevent contamination of the water supply). Now we have similar data, with a much stronger signal, from Mont Blanc ice. Moreover the signal has been extended to Antimony, a semi-metal which makes many metals, including lead and steel, much harder, and was also used by the Romans in glass manufacture (there were claims about unbreakable glass, etc.). The fact that Antimony production went up and down with the lead production shows that indeed Roman manufacture went up and down (other metals show a similar peaking behavior).

Romans used metals for tools, weapons, and construction (ships, roofs and inner structural elements). Metals are no anecdote. By the height of the Roman Empire, metals in use included: silver, zinc, iron, mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead, gold, copper, tin. Subtle alloys were ubiquitous and had very different properties from the pure metals (which the Romans knew how to refine). After a disastrous defeat at Carrhae (53 BCE), the Romans progressively adopted an armored cavalry similar to what the Parthians had… But that meant at lot of metal. At Carrhae, Parthian arrows pierced both Roman shields and the arms holding them. The fabrication of massive quantities of steel required to heat an iron mixture for hours at the temperature of lava… One needed an intense approach to metal works which was starting in Gallic areas (like Noricum/Austria)… But which did not interest the Romans… At least Romans from the Mediterranean…

One of the reason of the ascent of the Franks while the Roman state was sputtering, was the introduction by the Franks of very heavy steel or cast iron ploughs which could work at the depth required the heavy rich soils of the northern European plain, and feed a population explosion… in northern Europe. Thus the Roman tech collapse was both absolute and relative (the north collapsed much less).

Any successful civilization ravages its environment: that’s what success means. To persist, the civilization must develop new technology to change from the old, unsustained and unsustainable environment to a better one in which the new tech will allow it to thrive. 

Emperor Vespasian, who succeeded Nero, is on the record saying that new machines should not be deployed, lest they augment unemployment. Europe and others, in 2024, have been saying the same about AI. Vespasian was followed by his two sons. That Flavian dynasty lasted nearly thirty years, plenty of time to install an anti-tech mood.

To become an industrial, machine based civilization, Rome needed metal, lots of metal… Instead, Rome stayed mostly a slavery based state. However in Gaul, Gallia, the slave employing giant Latifundia were nearly unknown… And this is precisely where the tech driven society arose.

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To make machines Rome needed metals:

The Gauls started to use metals crucially in agriculture with heavy ploughs and mechanical harvesters pushed by domesticated donkeys or oxes. The resulting demographic explosion explains why Gallia/Francia became the successor state of Rome in the West in the Sixth Century…. And one can see it in the lead and antimony production graph. Plutocratically owned immense latifundias with armies of slaves in Italy could not use such technology.

Moreover, Rome ran out of metal, precluding a switch to a more industrial state … to give some perspective, Europe and China got into massive pig iron production by the 12th century (and may have communicated about this through the Silk Roads). Rome metal usage peaked under Trajan and then quickly collapsed. One reason was the invasion of Rio Tinto under Marcus Aurelius. But the collapse started earlier and may have been caused by a lack of interest in metal usage. That theory is indicated by the loss of control of Rio Tinto. Had Rio Tinto been perceived as crucial, control would have been kept… the fact it was not is an indication of a deeper rot… 

By the 7th Century, the dearth of metal was so great that it prevented the fabrication of weapons such as Grecian Fire flame throwers: the roofs of Rome had to be stripped of metal. The emperor came especially from Constantinople to insure that metal procurement from Rome. Then the Muslims surprised and sank the metal carrying fleet….

If the tech does not follow, civilization will collapse so the wisdom has to adapt to a collapsed, nihilistic state of mind: consider Plotin (died 300 CE)… Plotin’s philosophy is all about surrender to anything material, the wish to evanescence…

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EMPIRE Started to COLLAPSE AROUND 100 CE! The graph is from Mont Blanc ice. The results are the same as from the many similar measurements in Greenland. TRA is for Trajan, peak of lead extraction under the Roman fascist empire. The collapse of metal production started at the time of the beginning of the Roman Civil War, when the Gracchi were opposed ferociously by the plutocrats.

Simplicius: Isn’t it true that according to Patrice’s own theory, Rome collapsed first in its democracy, under the madness of the Optimates fighting the Gracchi’s judicious reforms, and then politically, thus intellectually, bringing up then a succession of tyrants, starting with Augustus? What does tech have to do with it?

PA: Right. But remember that Rome beat Carthage by imitating and then overtaking its Punic rival once superior naval tech. Similarly in Gaul with the invention of the “corvus”, which enabled to disable Gallic ocean going ships. However, the situation became hard to reverse when the mental fascism got so great that technological innovation was not sufficient to keep the barbarians out of the gates… As had already happened under Marcus Aurelius. 

So it’s a cascade in authoritative regimes: the mental fascism gets so great that innovation collapses, even in defense.

Simplicius: What about Putin’s Russia?

PA: In 2023, Putin’s Russia grew more economically (GDP) than any G7 nation (with more than 7% of defense GDP according to The Economist Intelligence Unit). So Putin successfully switched to a militarization of society developing new weapons that were highly successful, such as old steel heavy bombs with navigational and gliding kits. It may well be that Putin is aware of the problem described here.

Simplicius: I am confused by you. Doesn’t that contradict your theory that political fascism brings mental fascism which leads to a lack of innovation?

PA: In general, but not always. If the dictator is really smart, like Caesar or Peter the Great, Or Ivan the Terrible, or the various Kremlin tyrants who fought the Mongols by serving them, a dictator can be civilizationally progressive. Emperor Meiji is an example. Or Queen Bathilde and her outlawing of slavery. Peter the Great for example went to work in Dutch naval shipyards to find out how one made ocean going ships, because he wanted to make Russia into a sea power.

Rome could have survived by maintaining a tech superiority, it din’t. The fascist emperors feared tech change because it brings mental change, hence philosphical change, thus political change, as politics is practical philosophy…

Simplicius: The Franks you are obsessed with do not seem to have such a superiority.

PA: They did. They developed new tech. They kept weapon superiority. The francisque, the two blade throwing ax was a symbol of that. The heavy ploughs were much more important. The Franks were fundamentally peasants (by 600 CE everybody was a Frank). The Franks’ metal usage by 800 CE was equal to Rome’s peak under the Roman Republic. Sure enough, shortly after the metal production in Francia started to exponentiate, Queen Bathilde outlawed slavery, a major break from antiquity.

Simplicius: So you are saying that philosophical, political, economic and technological progress are all related?

PA: Yes, they form a chain: break a link and the chain breaks. One of the failure of Athenian democracy was the horrendous way it could treat adversaries, neutrals (Mellos), allies and even its own heroes (all great Athenian heroes had their names written on ostracizing shards of clay, and most were indeed ostracized or even executed, even the greatest statemen, even the victorious generals and admirals, such as Pericles’ son… for very dubious reasons…)

This Athenian philosophico-ethical failure facilitated military defeat.… And then the collapse of everything. By contrast, Rome was much more careful that way. Caesar was accused of atrocities in Gaul, of all places, and that forced him to cross the Rubicon with a legion… But that unfortunate episode is indicative that ethical treatment of adversaries was a notion in Rome (although it had been violated against Numantia, Carthage, etc.). By the way, Rome used ostracism lightly. Caesar was assassinated by a bunch of ungrateful idiotic plutocratic traitors… Caesar was not ostracized: the people of Rome was all for him. In contrast Athenian democracy ostricized most of its greatest architects… Even Solon left for a decade before he became undesirable (that was two generations before the formal invention of ostracism)…

It’s not just the Romans and Athenians. The Maya, and much of what happened to the Middle Earth, long the forefront of civilization until ecological devastation set in are equally enlightening: tech could have rescued the civilizations but was short of that… The Maya tried to rebound, after a seven centuries hiatus, and then recollapsed, just before the Spaniards showed up… Another drought and no tech to handle it…

Differently from others which, plainly, could not have developed the tech Rome could have made it, transforming itself into an industrial power, if there had been a VERY forceful technological policy in place.

Many of the technologies which were developed massively under the Franks were already available on a small scale, especially in Gaul. However the scale stayed small under Roma enslaving plutocracy. The massive usage of heavy ploughs shifted food production, hence military power, to the north. Neither Rome nor Constantinople were ready to facilitate that with unbounded enthusiasm. And then the outlawing of slavery forced the usage of animals and machines… A fascinating subject to study further is the relationship between the Franks and Constantinople… which lasted more than seven centuries… In the Tenth Century, a military alliance between Constantinople and the Franks extirpated the Muslim piracy state in southern France which was raiding all over Europe….

Simplicius: Lessons for today?

PA: The civilization we have with the present tech, especially of primary energy production, is completely unsustainable. Solar panels can help considerable… But ultimately nuclear technologies have to be developed to the point they can be fully safe and clean. Physics show that it can be done; the rest is technological detail. We need to get really smart. But when a plutocracy start to dominate, its greatest tool is general stupidification. No smarts, no future. An example of this is Europe, which is pushing for extremely stupid policies of “degrowth” and “deindustrialization”… The Roman case study shows that the exact opposite should be done.

Simplicius: And if not? If we are not smart?

PA: Seven billion violently killed. To start with. And, absent easy access to minerals, civilization may well never reappear… Fermi paradox solved…

Simplicius: So what’s the grand conclusion?

PA: That mentalities matter. Mentalities drive civilizations and thus history. With right mentality, the Romans would have pulled hard towards better, and that’s often simply, especially in those times, more powerful tech. Caesar understood this: he even wanted not just to drain the proverbial swamps and the attending malaria, and this he did… Caesar also wanted to divert the Tiber itself…. The port of Rome had to be displaced, so Romans could move mountains… But the Romans had to understand, we all have to understand that the most important mountains are mountains of thoughts….

Patrice Ayme

Is Europe Making The Same Civilizational Error As Rome? Not Advancing Technology Maximally While It Can, And Should?

Ecology never stands alone, it always rests on technology, since there is a genus Homo and it rules with its culture, tools and weapons [1]. Today’s Europe has, naively and in spite of history, opted for “degrowth“. So had Rome in its time… but unwittingly… It didn’t end up too well. Just as Putin invading Ukraine… The world’s largest metal mine, Rio Tinto, crucial to the Roman economy, evoked below, got attacked by the mysterious Tauri (under Marcus Aurelius) in 172 CE (and thereafter)… And didn’t recover. This caused among other things, a devastating devaluation of currency…

When tyranny got established in Rome, panem et circenses (bread and circus) were provided to the People. But what Rome needed was subsidized food coming from Egypt, and Taylor Swift, but hard core technology. Instead, it stayed stuck with slavery, and a semi welfare state, emptying the core (Italy) while enriching global plutocrats. 

Europe, having misinterpreted history under the influence of so-called “French Theory” is repeating that pattern. “French Theory”, a US term, was the original wokism, which infected US universities’ “humanity” departments decades ago… “French Theory” infected France, progressively and ever more, after the ruinous victory of WW1 stolen from France and Britain by the crafty and greedy US Deep State. “French Theory” is basically a general appeasement, fundamentally sensual defeatism, generalized to… all the way to… child molesters (those used to be esteemed in France up to very recently…) 

Europe, and the world, like Rome at its apex, have huge ecological problems. Rome depended upon a number of technologies which couldn’t be used anymore, because of their limitations. For example the extraction of metals… Although the subject has not been studied as it deserves by lazy academics, it’s clear that Rome came short in metals… and also probably wood (as Athens had, much earlier). Global trade depended upon thousands of cargo ships. That in turn caused military food and procurement problems. The world has the same situation now, fossil fuels and military advantage becoming increasingly problematic. 

The solution is to advance technologically. Even Obama understood that, by subsidizing SpaceX, for example. 

Europe has opted for panem et circenses at this point, whereas much of the advanced world has opted for advancing tech. Not just the USA, but also China, India, Japan, etc. At this point Europe can’t launch a satellite with its own means… Iran just launched three… with its own rocket…

As Rome collapsed under its own corruption, Gaul used the leverage of its more advanced and productive metallurgy to make heavy plows which overturned the rich soils of north-west Europe, enabling a well-fed and large population… By the Thirteenth Century France’s population was 20 million, at least a fourth of the maximal imaginable population of the Roman empire. The Franks outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century, fostering ulterior tech advances.

It goes without saying that the present European Union, with its institutionalized wokism, is refusing to develop, as much as it could, for reasons very similar to those of the Roman empire. Roman emperors, starting with Vespasian (circa 70 CE) refused to let engineer deployed machines under the pretext that machines would cause unemployment… We hear the same whining with AI now….

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Sun Chainik chimed in responding to me in the Wall Street Journal: “Fighting climate will kill both the EU and the US. Delusional.“

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Fighting the climate is silly, but adapting to it, smart.

If one burned all fossil fuels, there would be a runaway greenhouse. Not smart. 

The mistake Rome made was not to adapt to the changing ecology in such a way that it could keep on growing: Rome didn’t have the technology to extract metals once it had exhausted the old mines. It could have had it. But, under the fascist plutocratic emperors, choose not to develop tech. Rio Tinto, once massively exploited in Rome, saw no extraction for 17 centuries…. Until new tech arrived. The lack of metals made it impossible to resist even the Muslims (although all metal roofs of Rome were stripped in the effort!). Rio Tinto:

This is very much man-made, very beautiful pollution… 5,000 years old. Carthage exploited in for four centuries before Roman conquest… Traces of the man-made metal pollution from Rio Tinto have been found in the fossil clams and soil of the Gulf of Cadiz and all the way to Greenland… It was the Roman, and world’s, largest mine (region). The tunnels extended nearly 150 meters deep. Water was evacuated by giant water wheels, 6 or 7 meters acrodd… After a period of abandonment, starting in 180 CE, the mines were rediscovered in 1556 CE and the Spanish government began operating them a bit once again in 1724. As a result of the mining, Rio Tinto is notable for being very acidic (pH 2). Its deep reddish hue is due to sulfide-consuming bacteria and other extremophiles that amplify the acidification process. These organisms give the river its red hue in part from iron, copper, zinc and arsenic dissolved in the water…

Fortunately, right now, tech is adapting quickly in most places. And Europe could change policies.

Example: French Safran is providing US plane maker Electra with a hybrid turbojet that will load in flight batteries of a ten passenger plane that will be able to take off in 100 feet and fly 500 miles in two hours. Thousands of these planes, which will revolutionize transportation, have already been ordered.

So Europe has the capacity to advance. Right now, it’s killed by the advocates of degrowth. Degrowth is what happened to Rome after Trajan, under the Antonine emperors… And then it got worse. 

Perhaps Trump and Putin are Europe’s best friends, as they could well cause Europe to wake up technologically!

Patrice Ayme

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[1] So is man Homo Faber (Homo Tool, Homo the Fabricator…) or… HOMO ECOLOGICUS? The latter is more general: one of our tool weapon and effect is the ecology itself (see the savages using fire for ecological husbandry…).

GENETICS FROM TECHNOLOGY… Transhumanism For Millions Of Years Already! Humans Are The Technological Species: Homo Technologicus? Therein Morality?

Abstract: Technology Drove Genetics! Genetics can change at the rate of ecology. If one gives it some thought, that was a necessary meta-adaptation which life had to evolve. And this is now demonstrated, at least in flies.

But why would it be different in humans? The underlying physics, biology and evolutionary pressures are the same. However, technology modifies human ecology. Homo Technologicus is 3 million years old, influencing our ecology. This is probably why humans changed so much in the last three milion years, in a virtuous spiral of a rising genetico-technological spiral! The genetico-technological singularity started millions of years ago. The consequences of this perspective to all aspects of what we call humanity are enormous.

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Everywhere We Look, Technology:

Not even poetry would exist, without technology. This is why only humans have poetry: because only humans have technology. Wherever we look, we humans see and are surrounded by technology, and have been for three million years, 150,000 generations… Plenty of time to co-evolve: technologies are us… Our big brains may be our first technology… the fruit of our technological efforts! Let me explain… 

Stones, cut and pointed to be sharp, cutting, penetrating or smashing… is technology. Our ancestors elaborated them before our brains grew at a rate proportional to their capabilities… Clothing is technology: no temperate area would have been colonized without clothing (and Africa was not excluded as genes went back and forth between Asia and Africa, for two million years, with Homo Ergaster!) Fire and cooking are technologies (Neanderthals cooked vegetables). Without fire, the megafauna would have been difficult to keep away from increasingly precise and subtle, but then weak and delicious humans… humans who could become ever more brainy and less brawny, as technology protected and leveraged them… ever more.

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GENETICS CAN GO AT THE SPEED OF ECOLOGY:

Recent studies have shown that genetic, inheritable variability in response to the environment can happen within three or four generations… ….”evolution is acting so fast that ecology and evolution are operating at the same timescale.” This is not surprising, as, naturally and frequently, the ecology can evolve very fast and then durably: contemplate the three Dryas episodes, when Europe fell back into glacial ages, all of a sudden, in a few years, and stayed there for a millennium, or more (the causes of the Dryas are still partly mysterious). 

An exponential rate of growth grows proportionally to itself. Now humans have long created their own ecology… Thus humans learned to exponentiate themselves… through technology. Maybe humans didn’t learn it culturally as much as genetically, but, as a species, they learned. That makes humans in some sense, if not masters, at least the cause, of their own evolution… And there always has been a genetic advantage to accelerate human genetico-technological evolution: contemplate the war in Ukraine, where drones are dominating the battlefield. 

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Dogs play, but they can’t do poetry: they don’t have the technology to record, nor the capabilities to make a recording: no hands, not much of a subtle voice.

My dog can vocalize grunts meaning yes, and others meaning no, and he is very good at pointing toward what he wants, or using body language, like walking away, after I make a suggestion he does not appreciate, or squealing enthusiastically after I bring food from the store. It seems that only humans can transmit culture without being physically present (wolves howling and lions roaring are the most primitive culture, through warnings…). 

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Bergson evoked “Homo Faber” The Homo who fabricates, to label us. But that’s not specific enough, we are more special than that. Lots of animals make and use tools. For example humpback whales use bubble cages to herd fish, and some crow species can devise extracting tools (as do chimps). Dogs would use tools, too if they had hands. These claws frustrate my dog so much.

Humans have been using tools and weapons which they fabricated, for millions of years. And then fire was mastered, maybe 1.5 million years ago (say Chinese archeologists).

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Technology is science and vice versa: 

Technology is too important a concept to be left as the exclusive province of the elite, billionaires and other plutocrats. Technology took part in the creation of our species. 

Technology is everywhere, and has been, for millions of years, to the point it helped evolve the human species. Books, clothing, weapons and pots are technology (of “hardware” type). Writing, speaking, fire making, sculpting, botany, ethology is technology (of software type). Techno-logy: Specialized discourse…. All of culture is actually technology. Making fire in a wet forest with just sticks is technology (and one modern people don’t know).

Science and knowledge, in this general sense, have much in common with technology. (If one knows one is hungry, or in love, or afraid, that’s not technological, right; but Quantum Physics can be viewed as technology, or engineering, as it’s a method, or more generally an art to make predictions of fundamental processes in some spaces; in general Qunatum Physics can’t make precise predictions, the problems are just too complex, one can solve completely only a couple of them, and the physics community hopes that Quantum Computers will help with Quantum Physics!)

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Etymology Of Technology: the fabrication of discourses:

“Technology” is the Latinized form of Greek tekhnologia “systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique,” originally referring to grammar, from tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē “art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing,” from PIE *teks-na- “craft” (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed form of root *teks- “to weave,” also “to fabricate.” 

Logy: Medieval Latin -logia, French -logie, and Logy: directly from Greek -logia, from -log-, combining form of legein “to speak, tell;” thus, “the character or deportment of one who speaks or treats of (a certain subject);” from PIE root *leg- (1) “to collect, gather,” with derivatives meaning “to speak (to ‘pick out words’).”

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What is the point of being technology aware? Understanding our world enough not to be enslaved by it. As AI becomes ever more important, it’s crucial to realize it’s not magic from a world of sorcerers and witches. Because, should we adopt the point of view of tech as magic, pretty soon we will be dominated by demons [1], and ruled by the likes of Harry Potter and other witches.

Technology made us genetically, so pondering technology is pondering what made us, our creator. Differently from Aztec gods, we can get to know that creator. While the prospects of war everywhere keep on going up, many have wondered what the roots of morality were. If the preceding is true, and it is, or close to it, our morality can’t be separated from our genetics and our technology.

The connection between ourselves and tech are as old as ourselves: transhumanism is what we do, and have been doing for millions of years. By the way, this answers the burning question of why there was a serpent in the garden of Eden… Technology was not created in the first place to smell the roses… But to master the flesh, and not just the flesh of apples… The will, the will to power, is also the will to technological power, and the power of the exponential. The exponential species, indeed!

Patrice Ayme

No tech, no art! A beautiful painting or music is not just a bunch of forms, but also technology in action. Only technology enables us to appreciate the beauty of the ocean in full. Up to a very recent time, seeing such a beautiful nonlinear wave action, could not have been poetically appreciated, because we would have been submerged, with the prospect of imminent death… technology makes even aesthetic appreciation possible:

[1] Life, increasingly enormously complicated self-replicating carbon based chemistry, appeared on Earth more than four billion years ago. Life is immoral, because morality assumes consciously embracing self-replicating ways… Something life couldn’t do without consciousness… and consciousness required brains, which evolved in the last half a billion years… However, to self-replicate, the essence of morality, humans need to embrace tech… as they co-evolved with it. 

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P/S 1: Famous philosophers have talked about tech, even before Heraclitus and Democritus (to whom Aristotle refer). Nazi Heidegger, a frequent reference among the pedants, was thoroughly confused (he stupidly thought technology started 2 centuries after math!) and hopelessly shallow, sploshing through his own turd… I mention Heidegger because Nazis-in-denial always mention Heidegger…

P/S 2: It goes without saying that the approach above is new, and radical…

Oppenheimer Became Death While Alive

Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists were amazingly in command of the nuclear weapons to an extent I did not suspect. I have studied the subject for decades and thought I knew it well. But new details appeared recently.

Oppenheimer was scientific director of the Manhattan Project, everybody who was anybody in physics had worked on the Manhattan Project.: hys prestige was immense. He and his fellow scientists guessed that Nagasaki would be enough to entice Japan to surrender immediately. So they decided to hold the pieces of the third bomb to be dropped on Japan, in the San Francisco Bay Area rather than fly them to the assembly and launch point in the Marianas. They were right: Hirohito succeeded -barely- to force the top generals to surrender. But the point is this: a handful of physicists decided not to drop a nuclear bomb. Their responsibility was immense, and extremely personal: the political leadership of the USA was nowhere in sight when that momentous decision was taken.

The even more momentous decision of dropping an untested Uranium bomb on Hiroshima was also arrived at by cold, completely unemotional and perfect logic. Killing 140,000 people was a crucial part of the experiment as this was the only way to persuade the Japanese high command that there would be no glory in the death through war of 100 million Japanese (which was the plan of the top general and many of his colleagues; they wrote poems about it…) [1].

All the physicists who helped with nuclear bombs collaborated in a mass murder, but one that was necessary to prevent much greater evil [2]. Later Oppenheimer slow walked the development of fusion bombs and thus was stripped of his highest security clearance. But, w-hell, we need fusion, and as I have argued much of the Cold War was just make-believe (the US Deep State used to love Stalin and made him many gifts… Like half of Europe…)

As Oppenheimer said, invoking the Bhagavad Gita after the first Plutonium implosion device illuminated the desert in full colors: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,
that would be like the splendor of the mighty one… Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Humanity can destroy worlds in many ways now: slowly with CO2, or fast, with man-made viruses. And instantaneously if we put AI in charge of nuclear weapons

Human technology has become divine. We must catch up. Our wisdom has to become divine. All the new technologies have fabulously positive consequences. But also fabulously destructive ones.

How to make sure we engage only the positive and not the negative? By limiting the powers of any single individual… as in direct democracy. Dangerous weapons such as nukes, must have their numbers pared down, worldwide, to just comet defense. That can be done only if the world is transparent enough.

So we must change the constitution of the world if we want to survive our increasingly divine psychology. No less.

And for doing this, we have to change the mood of the world. It was done before: consider Christianism, Islam, and more fundamentally, Roman law. Less known, it was done quickly and deeply in Twentieth Century physics. Under Niels Bohr, much of the Western philsophicl tradition was stood on its head. The distinction subject-object was eradicated, it was claimed that “physical reality” was an obsolete context. A mood was substituted which feminist theorist Karen Barad calls a culture of “play” and “anti-realism”. Cynics will observe that fascism, nazism, world war, occupations and holocausts followed in quick succession after this “new” philosophy was widely advertized.

There was of course nothing new in pretending that there is no such a thing as “reality”, the old mythologies, and reincarnations such Judeo-Christo-Islamism are full of attacks against reality (which is driven by physics, that is, nature, ever since there are animals and they observe…)

This is why SQPR stands for “Sub Quantum Physical Reality”… in contradistinction with CIQ and the very nasty reaction of Oppenheimer and his ilk against Bohm…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] There are only two places in Japan suitable for a large scale D Day (the third place is where the AMongols tried twice…) As the place next to Tokyo was superbly defended the Jap command thought they could defeat the Allies’ Operation Olympic… where it was bound to happen.

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[2] Physicists hating the Axis created and then drove the nuclear bomb effort. It started in France with a woman, Marie Curie’s daughter, who discovered the nuclear chain reaction of U235. She and her husband, both Nobel laureates, went to see the French war minister and told him, “one bomb, one city”. Within months the French enrolled the mightiest Norsk Hydro plant in Norway to produce Deuterium Water (Heavy Water) to slow down neutrons. The Nazis got wind of the French effort but never quite caught up. The French program ended in the US and Canada… Immense financing by Roosevelt, enticed by Einstein, did the trick and enabled to shorten WW2 and the immense death and suffering it caused in China.

What Oppenheimer claimed he didn’t want to see: Castle Bravo, a powerful H bomb. Now we have high temp supraconducting magnets with pressure of 2 tons per square centimeter, to bottle that down… Not yet deployed, even as a research experiment, but soon…

Survival of civilization depends upon technological progress. Respect to those dying for it.

The passengers of the Titan, the submersible visiting the Titanic, died probably because the carbon fiber hull failed. Implosion of such a hull happens at 2400 kilometers an hour, roughly 700 meters per second. However, that doesn’t mean there were no warning signs. Apparently there were, and they would have been probably a significant noise. The rumor has it that the sub dumped its weights. The only way that would be known is if they had informed the surface that they had decided to go for an emergency escape to the surface… No doubt because of loud sounds caused by delamination violently separating the resin-carbon fiber mix into layers…..

Some bemoan the useless loss of life… But it’s not that useless. Let’s call them technology and progress martyrs.

Thus next time someone tries to build a carbon fiber submarine, they, and the authorities, will have to be smarter and more careful about it.

Carbon fiber, if used massively, could help with a sustainable society… Thus save lives, millions of lives, maybe even more.

The problems with carbon fiber  though have been numerous: it tends to delaminate, and be sensitive to salt water or oxygen intrusions. Also it tends to fail catastrophically. The most recent planes are mostly built of carbon fiber, and the tech has required metallic meshes within to resist lightning and inform about cracks. 

SpaceX planned to make giant tanks out of carbon fiber, to use in their giant rocket, but after building a gigantic carbon fiber, they renounced and went back to steel (NASA had the same problem in the past, abandoning their single stage to orbit craft when carbon fiber tanks failed). Also a Falcon 9 was lost when a carbon fiber tank delaminated and had an oxygen intrusion. It exploded instantaneously.  

Some bemoan the cost to society. But the oceans need to be conquered: they make ⅔ of the planet. However, whereas the difference of pressure with the moon is one atmosphere, it’s nearly 400 atmospheres with the wreck of the Titanic. So 400 times harder, in a sense.

Worldwide, hundreds of private subs already operate. Rescue cost was nothing. Even the crew and management of the powerful French Ifremer Atalante, which rushed to the site across the Atlantic, besides the humane factor of maritime solidarity, probably considered this real life exercise to be instructive.

Patrice Ayme

French ship Atalante with its diving robot rushes to the rescue of Titan… It arrived to learn the sub had imploded…

What Was The Miracle Weapon Of World War Two? Me 262? Or The Obvious? And Who Got the Idea? A Woman!

A little relaxation of sorts… my way…

It may look strange, futile and slightly deranged to ask what would be, for all too many, an apparently desultory question, while a lethal virus is ravaging the planet. However a virus rampage was fully predictable, and yours truly had predicted such a disaster, and many others, many times. And there were even close calls by various viruses as explicit warnings from evidence. So I was castigated with the opprobrium of what I warned against.

We have this virus because we are led by the most foolish moods, habits, ways, and individuals. So it is not futile to establish truths. Exerting the truth muscle is not just a question of the honor of the human spirit, but also of sheer survival.

So let’s go to the gym of truth! 

Because of the blockade, the Nazis couldn’t get the Fundamental Elements they needed to make high temperature turbines, so the Me 262 didn’t work as well as it , by could have a very long shot

The Miracle Weapon of World War II Was A French Idea…

When one thinks of a miracle weapon in WWII, one generally thinks of the Me 262, the first jet, and first jet fighter. The Me 262 had a propulsion problem: reactors that were not powerful enough, not very resistant… Paradoxically the reactors were worse in 1944 than 1942, because of the blockade against Nazi Germany.

Germany could not manufacture the necessary high temperature metals because, after attacking Stalin, it no longer had access to the basic elements necessary to make these alloys. Hence the problems with the reactors. One type of Me 262 reactor used … aluminum, which melted, lasting only 10 hours …

Germany was led by fools who strongly, and correctly felt, in their hearts of hearts, that the war lost since that day of September 3, 1939, when france and Britain declared war to the stupid, vicious Nazis.

Indeed, if nothing else, Germany was subjected to the same blockade as in 1914 … with the difference that this time, differently from 1914-1916, the Netherlands was not there to bring the American necessities which fascism needed to make war. So, ironically, Stalin played in 1939-1941 the role of embargo buster that the USA had played in 1914-1916. It was more natural than it looked: Soviet and German fascists had been allies (semi-secretly) since 1916 …

A “Wunderwaffe” of which little is spoken is the teleguided Nazi surface to air rockett, “Wasserfall“. If the Nazis had developed it rather than V1 or V2, that would have changed a lot of things.

The French (more precisely the Communist Irène Joliot-Curie) launched the atomic bomb program in January 1938, by telling the Minister of War of her chain reaction… which became the “Manhattan” program. “A bomb, a city” was informed De Gaulle in Canada in 1944 by a French scientist who worked on the bomb (at the time even the US VP didn’t know about the atomic bomb)… Against this the Germans could only surrender. So the ultimate miracle weapon of war was French… of French origin …

Irène, Nobel Prize winner in 1933, really discovered nuclear fission. Otto Hahn is reputed to be noble, because supposedly he contemplated suicide when he heard of Hiroshima, as he “felt responsible”. That’s the same as saying he invented it. However, he didn’t. Instead Hahan resided in Hitler’s Third Reich during the entire duration, researching probably felt sad to have missed on the idea of the bomb (which Irène didn’t, and surmounting her disgust, her a Communist, she went to the French War Ministry). The first reactions of the imprisoned German nuclear scientists were not ambiguous: they would have liked to make the bomb, but given the state of Nazism in “1942”, they didn’t have the “moral courage”. Top German nuclear scientists didn’t have the “moral courage” to be good Nazis… Notice too that the Franco-British-Canadian-American effort to make a nuclear bomb started in January 1938: 1942 was way too late… And Germany didn’t have the means [1].

Ten “German” scientists were held in a house full of US microphones. Some of the result from a book about Hahn:

He “was now glad”… Yes, after the war, many a Nazi “was now glad” that Nazism didn’t work out, after all… German scientists were genuine Nazis: they regretted not to have developed the bomb, but then some of them concluded that it was for the best.

By August 1945, the main German newspaper in Southern Germany (written by Americans) crowed that the Germans, Otto Hahn had discovered nuclear fission and he got the Nobel prize right away (Irene Joliot Curie had been gravely sick since 1940, and this is why she and her husband didn’t go to London). So the not so noble Otto Hahn got the Nobel Prize for this subject which he had plagiarized (I have read the correspondence between the French Irene and the German Otto; it was a case of “Me Too”). It was not deserved: Irene spent months demonstrating her discovery to him… Ibidem, the fame Heisenberg was too stupid… And he, too, lifted his uncertainty from De Broglie. If you see a pattern of germanoids stealing french ideas here, you got it right…

Of course, few French people know this glorious and formidable history of their own country. The French have become like sheep and the USA is their shepherd (this is to achieve this that mongrels were depicted as giants, even if, like Sartre, they yelped at the USA).

Under the impetus of low-ranking thinkers, portrayed as if they were giants, France made the absurd into her abode, escaping into the tyranny of stupidity denying the very ideas of superiority and progress. France has forgotten herself, and its tremendous intellectual power.

Contemplate, right now, the stupid monarch from one of the oldest, wealthiest, more war prone banks, who forbids people to hike in the mountains, to go to the beach and the forests because he and his minions believe that there is a virus out there … A virus of which they were the main enabling agents… By refusing the proven remedies used by many countries in Asia (test, track, confine).

Yes, contemplate this and weep. No wonder they don’t even know they discovered the nuclear fission chain reaction.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Differently from the Germans, the Japanese had figured out that a nuclear bomb was feasible, and had three massive efforts to make them.

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Partial French version from Quora:

L’Arme Miracle de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale fut Francaise…

Le Me 262 avait un problème de propulsion: des réacteurs pas assez puissants, peu résistants…. 

L’Allemagne ne pouvait fabriquer les métaux hautes température nécessaires, car, après avoir attaqué Staline, elle n’avait plus accès aux éléments fondamentaux nécessaires pour faire ces alliages. D’ou les problemes avec les réacteurs. Un type de réacteur du Me 262 utilisait de … l’aluminium, il durait 10 heures…

L’Allemagne etait dirigee par des imbéciles qui sentaient fortement la guerre perdue depuis ce jour du 3 Septembre 1939: l’Allemagne était soumise au même blocus qu’en 1914… a la différence que cette fois les Pays Bas n’étaient pas là pour amener les nécessités Américaines dont le fascisme avait besoin pour faire la guerre. Donc, ironie de l’histoire, Staline a joué ce rôle. Il est vrai que fascistes Soviétiques et Allemands étaient alliés (semi-secrètement) depuis 1916…

Quelque chose dont on parle peu est la fusée Nazie teleguidee sol-air “Wasserfall”. Si les Nazis l’avaient développée plutôt que les V1 ou V2, cela aurait changé beaucoup de choses.

Les Français (plus précisément la Communiste Irène Joliot-Curie) avaient lancé le programme de bombe atomique en Janvier 1938… Qui devint le programme “Manhattan”. “Une bombe, une ville” fut informé De Gaulle au Canada en 1944 par un scientifique français qui travaillait sur la bombe… Contre cela les Allemands ne pouvaient que se rendre. Donc l’arme ultime miracle de la guerre fut… d’origine française…

Irène, prix Nobel 1933, découvra vraiment la fission nucléaire. Le Prix Nobel du pas si noble Otto Hahn a ce sujet n’était pas mérité: Irene pass des mois a lui démontrer sa découverte… Ibidem, Heisenberg était trop bête…

Bien sur peu de français connaissent cette histoire glorieuse et formidable. Sous l’impulsion de penseurs de bas quartier, dépeints comme s’ils étaient des géants, la France a versé dans l’absurde, et la tyrannie de la bêtise niant les idées même de supériorité et de progrès. La France s’est oubliée elle même, et sa formidable puissance intellectuelle. 

Contemplez le stupide monarque issu de la banque, qui interdit les montagnes, la plage et la forêt car lui et ses séides croient qu’il s’y trouve un virus… Dont ils furent les principaux agents. En refusant les remèdes miracles d’Asie (test, track, confine). 

 

Corrupt Travel Industry Should be Forced To Use Hybrid, Hydrogen Planes

Civilizations decay when taken over by plutocracy, which makes their thinking heads decay into a corrupt mediocrity enabling greed and will to power, to devour deeper, more human values until the entire society sinks into idiocy.

Example? Big pharmaceutical companies spending more on advertising than on researching and developing new treatments: it should be completely unlawful. Doctors, pharmacists are the only individuals who should be appraised of treatments, and that should be done without bells, whistles, under the counter payments, and teams of pretty girls selling the products. (In some countries, such as France, pharmacists can prescribe).   

Another industry which got out of control was the travel industry, shuttling, at enormous ecological cost, people all around the world, for no good reason. When one is European, going for a week to South East Asia, just because it’s “cheap” is immoral, anti-ecological… and has turned outright homicidal.

Civilization should exact the exact price that air travel is costing the biosphere. (I can’t be accused to be anti-air travel, because I flew for the first time as a toddler; I have had a tricontinental life… Not my choice…)

The French engineer and inventor Clément Ader created the first planes (he had also created, among many other things, better telephony, the first wireless stereo, and V8 engines; as he was a formally educated engineer, Ader invented non-trivial things; he became wealthy in the process). Adler used new technology, steam engines which were the lightest ever made. He took off on 9 October, 1890. However, in the following decade, much more powerful gasoline engines were invented. After this, the pace of innovation in aviation was blistering. Between Ader’s first flight and the first jet engines, just half a century elapsed. Eighty years after Ader took off, humanity was landing on the Moon. Since then, we have pretty much stagnated.

A little dreamy vacation from the terrible Coronavirus… Flying Wing, big electric propellers in the back to supplement high bypass jet engines… Feasible now. [NASA picture.]

Hybrid propulsion for aircraft should be feasible with existing battery technology (or the one just around the corner, with twice the energy density; let alone solid state lithium, which is on the verge of industrial production; Ader invented the lightest engine: aviation should invent the lightest batteries). 

The point of aircraft hybrid propulsion is that much power is used during ascent or emergency (all engines on). Hybrid can recover much of this energy during descent (with appropriate large slow propellers working as air brakes in the back of the plane). Due to aviation needs batteries could be much improved (going to solid state, forgoing much of the present weight for cooling and isolation of the present flammable cells; in a car, battery mass is not that important).

One can easily sketch what should be done. But it would require vastly different airframes (large propellers in the back, etc.). 

Hydrogen planes are obviously feasible, as large hydrogen rockets routinely fly (as Ariane V). They just require a massive “green” hydrogen infrastructure, which is needed anyway (to store sustainable energy such as solar PV).  

Once again, different airframes would be needed. Airbus has been using the same airframe on the A320 for 40 years…. And Boeing for nearly 60 years on the 737… The whole airline industry has become corrupt, resting, fat and content, over huge subsidies, packing passengers like disease laden sardines, flying them all over the world for no good reason… 

Ader, who invented so many things, electric or not, also created the words “avion” and “aviation”… Coronavirus is showing us that flying people like sardines should be against the law. Airline subsidies should also be against the law, be they for not paying a fuel tax, for business jets, etc. High speed or not, AWE, pollution and energy cheaper electric trains should be subsidized instead.  

It goes without saying that the cruise ship industry should also be forced to go hybrid and sailing (omnidirectional sails exist)… And also slower. One large cruise ship (ironically made in France) was demonstrated to cause, anchored in Marseilles, France, as much pollution as two million cars. It should be all electric, and if that means nuclear engines, so be it. 

We know, from 99.99% sure paleontological record, and 100% from elementary geographical thermal logic that at 450 ppm CO2, oceans should be 30 meters (100 feet) higher. Now we are already at 500 ppm in CO2 equivalent. However, coronavirus is going to curb the human CO2 input this year (that may help us see how much CO2 augmentation is caused by human activity). Just as with viruses, humanity has been under the belief that this sort of thing happens to others. However, elementary logic and basic geography show we could have a breakup of the iceshileds within a few decades. 

So we need to shut down CO2 production. Air travel was expected to become a most major contributor, within a few years… Instead it’s momentarily shut down. It should not reopen was it used to be. In that respect, thanks, SARS-CoV2! 

Patrice Ayme

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Important P/S: The question of why the effect of civilizational sinking into idiocy didn’t happen in Medieval Europe is of the utmost interest; yes, right, it was a close thing. And sinking into ever deeper idiocy is what happened to the Greco-Roman empire. Arguably, much more was thrown at Middle Age Europe, including ecological overload from large populations, the terrible plague of 1348, and the Little Ice Age (which started around 1300 CE, just when all over Europe, population were peaking. A country like France was reaching the relatively enormous population of nearly 20 millions, just when the climate brutally cooled).

So why didn’t “Europe”, the “Renovated” empire didn’t sink into idiocy? After all, it still spoke Latin! It spoke Latin longer than Rome! Well, differently from Rome, Europe’s fascist index was lower than that of Rome. Basically imperial fascist Rome had one potentate, the emperor… who also headed the state religion, starting with Diocletian, Constantine (300 CE). By contrast, after the Carolingian empire breaking into pieces, Europe was in pieces… Sixty of them in Western France (Francia Occidentalis). The ferocious competition between the potentates, especially Paris and London, brought a race to technological superiority. For example, field guns were invented by the southern French to fight the English. But lots of the competition was also in pacific technologies, like textiles…

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P/S 2: Aircraft makers, except when working for the military, are part of the “travel industry”, of course… So are hotels, etc. Business jets get subsidies which should be cut right away.

 

Ongoing German Lies, And Why They Matter, Destroying Europe, & World. 1) Ecology

Some German anti-democratic lies have been ruling the world, for two decades now. It’s high time to get rid of them. A combination of Trump and progressive minds such as Uber-influential Nobel Paul Krugman of the New York Times, may well succeed to amplify my meek bleating in the dark.

Our times are cataclysmic, apocalyptic: after all, a sixth mass extinction has been launched. To stop it, we need the truth. Nothing but the truth, and all of it… that is we must denounce lies, and lying temperaments. We need science, that is, what’s left  

Trump lies outrageously, everybody knows this, but he is not the only one, all too many forget the latter. I have long said that Merkel’s Germany was off the track, and a big lie, in so many ways. Consider my Merkler? essay of 2012. Some will scoff that only Greeks got injured. No, all of Europe, and also Merkler’s insanity caused Brexit. I was ahead of times: now, seven years later, this point of view is gaining broad acceptance.

The camp of those who think Germany is lying has grown a lot: Trump is in it, and now even Trump’s nemesis Paul Krugman agrees with the liar in chief on Germany. German readers may object that France also lies (and everybody knows about delusional, Brexiting UK). However German lies are convenient for French corrupt politicians, Germany (in spite of all the fascist dictators), having a reputation for seriousness.

One may even argue that Germany ended up with monsters such as the Kaiser and Hitler, precisely because it had such  a serious, quasi-scientific repute… A belief in perfection which the Germans were the first to believe. 

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Energiewende Lie: Germany produces twice more CO2 per head than France (though about half of the USA). Worse: present policy does not make any improvement possible. In contrast, the USA has been best in the world at reducing CO2 emissions (albeit from a high starting point)…German Chancellor Merkel originated, lie has been “Energiewende”. the “Energy Transition“… which has consisted into Germany tapping some more coal, the bedrock of its heavy industry, for centuries.

Germany used its clout in environmentally correct policies (a lie!) to instill a mood of keeping on burning CO2 to produce energy, and, in particular, for burning coal. This has spread to all of Europe, and beyond:

https://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/europe/article/show/europes-coal-problem-3523/

Cute little picture… Full of lies, and implied dread. For example the picture describes and expect a lowering of energy consumption in Germany. All that means is that Germany is importing more, including nuclear from France. “Biomass” is a lie: it means making CO2 by burning old forests: it worsens the CO2 problem, planet-wide.

The truth is that, at this point, we have two new energy sources: photovoltaics and nuclear. Photovoltaics doesn’t work everywhere, and all the time. Nuclear is vast: U 235 fission, U 233 fission, Thorium, fusion, etc. Some have nuclear waste, others, not really. Even U 235 fission can be realized in many ways. The important point is that both danger and waste can be avoided completely using some nuclear technologies.

Nuclear devices will have to be developed, just to colonize other planets:

https://www.space.com/nuclear-propulsion-future-spacecraft-nasa-chief.html

I am positively completely, even fanatically against some nuclear technologies, such as graphite-gas (see Chernobyl for the inconvenience), surgenerators (with present tech), or second generation U235 reactors. At Fukushima, three such reactors exploded and melted down (due to a litany of grave errors). In the end, the radiation stayed confined: babies can now use the Fukushima beach… (Contrarily to expectations.)

Germany is against nuclear some will say, because it is more interested to milk coal for as long as possible. It’s not about higher principles, but greed. Germany has said, explicitly, under Merkel, that nuclear was more of a danger than coal. Now we can see how false that is: the greenhouse is accelerating. Siberia was on fire, for weeks, now so is the Amazon:

Following expanding wildfires in the Amazon rainforest, NOAA/NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured a natural-color image of smoke above South America using the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument on Wednesday (Aug. 21). The image shows smoke above the Brazilian states of Amazonas (upper left), Para (upper right), Mato Grosso (lower right) and Rondonia (lower left). Lake Titicaca in Bolivia is visible, so are the Chilean and Peruvian coasts. Fires in the Amazonian rain forest used to be unthinkable… And so was our planet’s climate, unsinkable. But, surely, it’s flammable…

Usually perceived as culturally advanced Germany is helping to cause another holocaust… The entire planet on fire this time… Current oxygen levels are the result of millions of years of annual production. The loss of the Amazon won’t cause oxygen levels to immediately plummet… But the Amazon produces up to 6% of the Earth’s oxygen. So, as I have said in the past, there is an oxygen threat… Indeed, acidification of the ocean from CO2 could kill the plankton… Losing 50% of world’s O2 production.

But, says, Merkler, nuclear is the scariest thing…

Next we will consider the problem of debt, where the German attitude has proven even more hypocritical, and immediately injurious, abating industry in Europe (hence counter-measures to the CO2 built-up…) Something for the G7 to mull…

Patrice Ayme

Those Flying Boats Fight The CO2 Catastrophe

California, while burning, in a never seen before way, builds (some) electric cars and installs a significant solar electric production capability. However, there are other ways to advance the struggle for more ecological tech. Competing sailboats is one way.

A competition of sailboats is organized from Saint Malo, France, to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, every four years. It’s open to all transoceanic sailboat categories, “ultimes”, multi-hulls, monohulls IMOCA, etc… as long as there is only one person on board. Prizes are attributed in each classification category.

Up to four years ago, the fastest boats were giant trimarans. Now, no more. A new, even faster category, has blossomed: enormous flying maxi-trimarans, known as “Ultimes”. Other boats also fly onto of foils, including monohulls…

Banque Populaire Flying Giant Trimaran flying at the start of Route du Rhum… Against the wind… Notice it leaves little wake, relative to the motor boats escorting it. The same boat left floater, high up in the air in this picture, would tear apart in a storm at 70 km/h, a few thousand kilometers later…

An object in a liquid is slowed down by friction, all along the hull. If one can reduce the surface of the object rubbing against the liquid, one can go faster. Thus the Ultimes rise above water on wings (which fly inside the water). 16 tons of boat rest on just a total of 4 square meters of foils. (Wings can be much smaller in water, and enable to fly at much lower speeds, as water is 1,000 times denser than air…)

So what? What’s the wisdom to be extracted from all this tech avalanche?

Well, we, humanity, are a tech avalanche. No tech, no wisdom. Or then just that of an orangutan.

Ah, yes, we are killing the planet.

It’s going to get way worse, in the next decades, as the man-made CO2 climate catastrophe enfolds. Predictable and predicted! Picture by author, last January, Tahoe:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/climate-catastrophe-california-forests-dying-giant-fires-coming-in-2018/

Maritime transport is one of the main sources of CO2 pollution.

The technology developed by these (mostly) French boats could be applied to cargo boats 10,000 times heavier.

Same flying boat in action, foils in evidence.

Nothing to smirk at: the sailboats can fly at 80 kilometers an hour (50 mph), using just the wind. Not just pushed by the wind, but even zigzagging into the wind.

It’s not without risks: the “ultime” Banque Populaire IX (pictured) lost its left floater, while in a storm, in the middle of the Atlantic, and immediately capsized. Shortly before that, it was flying with minimal sails at 70 kilometer and hour, in five meters seas. (A fisher boat recovered the captain, an expert capsizer, and brought him to Portugal, two days of motorboat away.)

At least two other flying boats capsized because of storms in the same race, one, skippered by a British sailor hit rocks off Guadeloupe shortly before the end. Alex Thomson, who placed second and third prior in the Vendee-Globe, solo around the world race, had forgotten to charge his shockwatch. So he overslept in his 20 minutes sleep, and got woken up when his boat hits the rocks. Thomson was leading in the monohull category, and was in fourth place overall behind two ultimes and one multihull. The international jury gave him a 24 hour penalty for using his motor to extract himself from the reefs…) Another boat captained by the Normande Claire Pruvot was hit by a cargo ship which recovered her 45 minutes later…

Overall, the death rate of these sailing adventures is now very low. Capsizing has become a well mastered art, with insubmersible boats, and immediate alerts. It was not always this way: the famed solo sailor Alain Colas disappeared on the same Route du Rhum, 40 years ago, while leading it. His boat, then the world’s most advanced multihull, could sink, it was made of metaL, and sink it did. Colas’ last message, in a terrible storm, was that he was surrounded by mountains of water.

The reason sailboat tech has not been applied much in large transport has been mostly political, as usual. Maritime transport was long excluded from pollution rules, thus used the very worst oil residue refineries produced… this is the highly polluting “bunker” fuel. Rotating sails can be used (they exploit the fact that if wind slips faster on one side of an object, a low pressure occurs, just as where the wind slows down, so molecules pack up, and higher pressure happens. This is why rotating balls have curving trajectories.) Rotating sails enable at least 10% savings.

Investing massively in wind tech for major boats has an element of risk, so government should help. Northern Europe has mandated stricter pollution rules.

Recently a giant cruise ship, the largest in the world, made in France, berthed in Marseilles, France. It was computed that it polluted as much as two million cars, that is of the order of the entire Provence region of France.

Air transport will also have to be improved, with electricity (hybrid planes, recharging while descending, etc.) Yes, that depends upon batteries. But, as with antibiotics, much more public research investment have to be done. One can’t just let private companies do it all. The rumor has it that Samsung has improved battery tech considerably with graphene (charging in minutes, and with 40% more energy storage). Right, graphene was discovered thanks to government research funding. But more public funding is needed.

A 62 year old Frenchman, Francis Joyon, won the Route du Rhum this year. A few miles from the end, his boat was just a few boat lengths away from Gabart, a young sailing and engineering genius who had been 200 nautical miles ahead earlier on. But Gabart’s most modern boat was “broken”, with a missing foil on the right, and a missing safran on the left. The competition was nearly delayed, because the storms piling up in the Atlantic were so numerous and so nasty (still another consequence of the climate catastrophe).

Francis Joyon of France set a new record time for the 3,542-nautical mile Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe solo transatlantic race from Saint Malo in Brittany to Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. At the helm of the maxi-trimaran IDEC Sport, Joyon completed the solo race in seven days, 14 hours and 21 minutes, beating the existing course record by just 46 minutes and 45 seconds (Gabart and Joyon mostly slowed down by storms; the other four ultimes were damaged, or capsized, although two restarted after repairs over a few days in Spain).

That Frenchman Joyon holds the around-the-world world record in a sailboat; less than 41 days (with a team)… It was his seventh participation in that competition, and his first win… Gabart, and many others, wants foils to be controlled automatically in real time: it will allow the boats to fly more safely and better. Right now regulations forbid automatic wing adjustments (although they are central to modern aviation… The reason is that it will cost money to have adaptive foils, and that will advantage the wealthiest, and that’s seen as unfair by the competition authorities at this point. Joyon won with an older “Ultime“; the three most recent “ultimes” broke, although Gabart was able to cross the Atlantic with his “broken boat”…)   

Gabart’s MACIF boat flying. Gabart placed second with MACIF, seven minutes behind Joyon. MACIF had lost its left wing… Those boats can sustain 70 km/h in 5 meters seas…

High tech moguls from Silicon Valley informed me years ago (before Elon Musk), that only software was really high-tech (Musk is changing that perfectly dumb perspective). The rest of tech was obsolete, they reckoned. Material high-tech was not high-tech, according to those mentally deficient characters obsessed by software. But software without hardware can’t exist, and they progress together. Flying sailboats use ever more electronics, and will probably soon use active flying surface, quite a bit similar to those the BFR, the Big Falcon Rocket of Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to use when re-entering the atmosphere at 11 kilometers per second…

Patrice Ayme