Bean Bytes retweeted
We really hope Scott is right that hand craft makes a comeback.
People (usually on Insta) are always crying that we’re killing stone carvers but I’m like, dude, we employ half the stone carvers in the country! I’m exaggerating a bit, but all we’ve done with robots is create a market for stone carvers again. Sculpture that was so wildly inaccessible has been made just affordable enough that all these talented craftspeople can now get jobs working in stone (handling the details a robot can’t).
Some of our carvers were accomplished carvers already but most of them are recent art school grads and fabricators getting trained up in the old ways.
Bean Bytes retweeted
I can finally share a prototype of the AI-generated art installation I’m building for my office using 16-segment displays.
Bean Bytes retweeted
Witness cisternal maturation in action, in a full Golgi ribbon!
Visit smart-biology.com to learn more!
#biology #science #education #animation #3D #STEM #EdTech
Bean Bytes retweeted
If you measure primary energy correctly, you’ll realize that human civilization is already almost entirely solar powered.
18 TW of “primary energy” is a rounding error on the 12,000 TW of sunlight that powers our agriculture, to say nothing of the photosynthesis that maintains our atmosphere, or the heat that keeps our planet habitable.
The reason that 18 TW is so impactful is that we’re able to precisely direct that energy for human needs, and the conversion efficiency is far better than the 0.007% conversion of sunlight to human metabolism our agriculture provides.
Photovoltaics and battery storage allow us to efficiently harvest and direct the energy from our planet’s most powerful energy resource.
Primary energy isn’t the thing we’re after - it’s exergy.
Primary energy is wrong, but not how you think.
Primary energy gets criticized because it doesn’t take into account the losses that occur when converting and delivering energy.
This makes fossil fuels look like they do more work than they really do because most of that energy is lost as heat.
“Final” or delivered energy actually has the same problem. Final energy only accounts for a small number of losses.
If you’re heating a home and you use a heat pump, you can deliver less electrical energy but deliver the same amount of heat.
If you insulate the home, you can maintain the same temperature without even delivering as much heat.
Neither primary nor final energy measures how much energy we "need."
Primary energy measures the energy we have available. It's not supposed to be a measurement of how effectively we put that energy to use.
The real problem with primary energy is not that it doesn’t take losses into account, it’s that it doesn't measure our real primary energy supply.
Primary energy is a measurement of energy in nature before conversion losses. Our figures for primary energy don't account for the biggest and most important source of energy on the planet - the Sun.
Humans farm 48 million square kilometers of land. ~12,000 terawatts (TW) of sunlight powers our agriculture, ~660x our “primary energy” of "18 TW".
That 12,000 TW of sunlight is converted into 0.8 TW of human metabolism at a whopping 0.007% efficiency.
The point of measuring primary energy is to understand what resources we have available and how better to harness them. Not including the 12,000 TW of sunlight that powers our civilization leads to the wrong intuitions about energy.
Imagine for a moment that we didn't have the Sun. Even with our best LEDs, we would need around 24,000 TW of electricity just to provide light for our current agriculture.
To make that 24,000 TW of electricity we would need about 60,000 TW of fuel. That’s over 3,000x our “primary energy” just to grow food.
(side note: this is also why vertical farming doesn't work at scale)
We're extremely lucky that 12,000 TW of our primary energy supply already comes in the form of light. We would need 5x as much energy if we had to get it from chemical sources. (or from nuclear fission)
At 60,000 TW, we would burn through all known coal reserves in ~6 days.
Even if we had an unlimited source of carbon, Earth's atmosphere would run out of oxygen in ~3 years.
We are already living in a solar powered world. The Sun drives >99.9% of all Earth’s energy flows.
Primary energy is useful because it tells us what's possible.
If we could convert sunlight into human metabolism at 1% efficiency, we could support 100 billion humans on just 8% of the farmland we use today.
Agricultural technology is a method of improving the conversion efficiency of sunlight to human metabolism.
Solar photovoltaics are a method of improving the conversion efficiency of sunlight to useful energy for powering civilization.
Almost all of our energy comes from the Sun. We simply cannot get that magnitude of energy from anywhere else.
The task of scaling human civilization is to more effectively harness and utilize the energy our Sun provides us.
When we look at primary energy from first principles, that becomes unmistakably clear.
