Some may like this story...

[owlice]

It's called Manna, and starts here. It's by Marshall Brain (Mr. How Stuff Works).

(And some may have already read it, and some may not like it. But here it is for your possible reading pleasure. Or annoyance. Your choice!)

[Beyond]

Gee, thanks owlice! I was about to go to bed about an hour and a half ago, when i made the mistake of clicking the blue here to see what 'Manna' was about. It's about nine l-o-n-g pages. It was pretty good though. Now i don't feel like going to bed. What the hoot, tomorrows saturday anyway. I should think that Mr. Brain must have a lot of general knowledge about things to have been able to write it.

[owlice]

So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm?

[Beyond]

So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm?

Well, actually it was more of an anti-bedtime story. It woke me up. I had to play some solitaire on the computer to get drowsy again.

[orin stepanek]

And I thought manna was food!

[Chris Peterson]

So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm? :ssmile:

:lol: Well, actually it was more of an anti-bedtime story. It woke me up. I had to play some solitaire on the computer to get drowsy again.

Solitaire is just a tool developed by your computer to make you wake it from hibernation periodically...

[Ann]

As for that story, it leaves me with an ominous feeling. I'll just quote one sentence from it:

"Why has no one ever been able to take over billions of human brains and create an army of zombies that way?"

I don't feel completely convinced that the scenario described in the story wouldn't allow someone to do just that...

Click to view full size image

Ann

[rstevenson]

As far as Science Fiction goes, it's a pretty simplistic story. One of the classic ways to generate a SciFi storyline is to say "If this goes on..." and then follow the logic. But you have to give reasonable extrapolations for all sides of the story, and this one is just silly in the way it pits one all-dark scenario against one all-bright scenario. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, to find they were all already on a brain-rack and simply experiencing a pleasant dream. But no, the author had a point to make and he made it -- logic be damned.

Rob

[Sam]

Area of All of Australia 7,617,930,000 m²
- divided by -
400,000 new residents per day for 4 years (the length of time Cynthia and Linda have been recruiting)
_______________
leaves an average 13 m² per individual to Live their Lives

(And what of the Australian population in 2011 of 22,651,808, or wildlife habitats, or the space needed for building more robots and reusing resources?)

The question is, how many terrafoam skyscrapers can the continent of Australia support?

[Beyond]

So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm?

Well, actually it was more of an anti-bedtime story. It woke me up. I had to play some solitaire on the computer to get drowsy again.

Solitaire is just a tool developed by your computer to make you wake it from hibernation periodically...

Ha-Ha-Ha. IF that's the case, mine doesn't really get to hibernate. In the 3 1/2 years that i've had a computer, i've played around 100,000 games of Klondike solitaire. Not so many Mahjong Titans, and not too many games of Hearts. The computer started cheating at Hearts!!

[Sam]

The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as only an exposure of the industry of meatpacking. This was not Sinclair's intention for the book though and not what he would have liked it to be famous for. The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power. Sinclair's observations of the state of turn-of-the-century labor were placed front and center for the American public to see, suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American wage slavery. The novel was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. It was based on undercover work done in 1904: Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards at the behest of the magazine's publishers. He then started looking for a publisher who would be willing to print it in book form. After five rejections by publishers who found it too shocking for publication, he funded the first printing himself. It was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February 28, 1906 and has been in print ever since.

...

One night, while looking for a warm and dry refuge, [Jurgis] wanders into a lecture being given by a charismatic Socialist orator, and finds a sense of community and purpose. Socialism and strong labor unions are the answer to the evils that he, his family and their fellow sufferers have had to endure. A fellow Socialist employs him, and he resumes his support of his wife's family, although some of them are damaged beyond repair.

The book ends with another Socialist rally, which comes on the heels of several recent political victories. The speaker encourages his comrades to keep fighting for victories, chanting "Chicago will be ours!"

[Chris Peterson]

They seem to have space elevators at an airport in Australia. That must be a real trick. Maybe the robots can rewrite the laws of physics!

[rstevenson]

They seem to have space elevators at an airport in Australia. That must be a real trick. Maybe the robots can rewrite the laws of physics!

Hi Chris,

As a fan of space elevators, but no expert on their physics, I'm curious what the problem would be with having at least one of them in Australia -- assuming, of course, we ever figure out how to build one. Is it just the fact that no part of Australia is on the equator?

Rob

[Chris Peterson]

As a fan of space elevators, but no expert on their physics, I'm curious what the problem would be with having at least one of them in Australia -- assuming, of course, we ever figure out how to build one. Is it just the fact that no part of Australia is on the equator?

Yes. A space elevator is a counterweighted tether with its center of mass in geostationary orbit. You can only do that over the equator. I can imagine something that eliminates this requirement by consuming a lot of power and reaction mass, and there are some very speculative alternatives similar to a space elevator that don't need to be on the geostationary band, but I think in this case the author just screwed up.

[rstevenson]

"geostationary" - right... I forgot about that little detail. A little off the equator might be fine, so long as the wobble at the top wasn't extreme, but I don't imagine you could get very far off the equator, and the closest Autralia gets is about 1000 km. Waltzing Matilda, indeed!

But having said that, I went Googling and found this quote from physicist Bradley Edwards, from a 2007 Q&A on the PBS Nova site... "The elevator can be placed anywhere within 20 degrees of the equator due to the dynamics, but the performance is best at the equator." He's talking about a space elevator anchored to something like an oil rig platform out in the Pacific.

Rob

[neufer]

A space elevator is a counter weighted tether with its center of mass in geostationary orbit. You can only do that over the equator. I can imagine something that eliminates this requirement by consuming a lot of power and reaction mass, and there are some very speculative alternatives similar to a space elevator that don't need to be on the geostationary band, but I think in this case the author just screwed up.

"geostationary" - right... I forgot about that little detail. A little off the equator might be fine, so long as the wobble at the top wasn't extreme, but I don't imagine you could get very far off the equator, and the closest Australia gets is about 1000 km. Waltzing Matilda, indeed!

But having said that, I went Googling and found this quote from physicist Bradley Edwards, from a 2007 Q&A on the PBS Nova site... "The elevator can be placed anywhere within 20 degrees of the equator due to the dynamics, but the performance is best at the equator." He's talking about a space elevator anchored to something like an oil rig platform out in the Pacific.

Well, the vast majority of the mass would be in the tether itself which would be held taut (around its center of mass at geostationary equatorial orbit) by centrifugal force as much as anything else... so why not have the ends somewhat non-equatorial.

(It would be interesting to see what would happen to the tether when Darwin gets hit by a major cyclone.) Waltzing Matilda, indeed!

[Chris Peterson]

The first part of the story brings to mind Jaynes's notion of a bicameral mind, where up to a few thousand years ago people existed at a lower level of self-awareness, and took action not upon reflection, but upon "hearing" commands (what would now be considered auditory hallucinations) on one side of their brain, produced by the other. Literally, the gods speaking to them, giving direction. Not at all unlike Manna...