Argonauts: Memes and Policies

These are the Argonauts’ core memes. Individual argonauts might be motivated by some or all of them. • Social Responsibility: Scientists must be held to professional standards, especially as technology becomes more enabling and potent. Profit or political/military gain should not be the deciding factor in which technologies are pursued; whatever benefits transhumanity most should prevail. • Opposing Government/Corporate Intervention in Science: Science should not be limited or restrai...

 Energy Needed to Power Civilization

The numerical results of my calculations show that the quantities of energy required for permanent survival and communication are surprisingly modest. For a society with the same complexity as the present human society on Earth, starting from the present time and continuing forever, the total reserve of energy required is about equal to the energy now radiated by the Sun in eight hours. The total energy reserve contained in the Sun would be sufficient to support forever a society with a compl...

 Hawking's Equation

awking has written down an equation which looks rather like Planck's equation. Hawking's equation is S = kA, where S is the entropy of a black hole, A is the area of its surface, and k is a constant which I call Hawking's constant. Entropy means roughly the same thing as the heat capacity of an object. It is measured in units of calories per degree. A is measured in square centimeters. Hawking's equation says that entropy is really the same thing as area. The exchange rate between area and en...

 Why Nothing Can Go Faster Than the Speed of Light

Einstein's equation gives us the most concrete explanation for the central fact that nothing can travel faster than light speed. You may have wondered, for instance, why we can't take some object, a muon say, that an accelerator has boosted up to 667 million miles per hour—99.5 percent of light speed—and "push it a bit harder," getting it to 99.9 percent of light speed, and then "really push it harder" impelling it to cross the light-speed barrier. Einstein's formula explains why such eff...

 Nuclear Winter

In discussing the state of the atmosphere following a nuclear exchange, we point especially to the effects of the many fires that would be ignited by the thousands of nuclear explosions in cities, forests, agricultural fields, and oil and gas fields. As a result of these fires, the loading of the atmosphere with strongly light absorbing particles in the submicron size range (1 micron = 10-6 m) would increase so much that at noon solar radiation at the ground would be reduced by at least a fac...

 The plural of anecdote is not data

A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involvesinductive reasoning. For instance, if an anecdote illustrates a desired conclusion rather than a logical conclusion, it is considered a faulty orhasty generalization.[10] For example, here is anecdotal evidence...

 Dimensions of an Atomic Size Computer

If we somehow manage to make an atomic size computer, it would mean that the dimension, the linear dimension, is a thousand to ten thousand times smaller than those very tiny chips that we have now. It means that the volume of the computer is 100 billionth or 10^-11 of the present volume, because the volume of the "transistor" is smaller by a factor of 10^-11 than the transistors we make today. The energy requirements for a single switch is also about eleven orders of magnitude smaller than t...