Panther140 — Thanks. I missed that the first time around. Yikes.
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Discount the prospect of climate change if you like. Eventually the billions of refugees will just emmigrate away from constantly storm flooded areas.
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The second problem of over population and fossil energy depletion is just as dangerous.
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The prospect is an oncoming ice age, like the Maunder Minimum. Seriously. It's the Sun/Earth/Moon gravity couple.
Did you know they are homing in on Isaac Asimov's Positronic Brain?
https://www.wired.com/story/brain-built-on-switches/
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The device is a far cry from conventional computers, which are based on minute wires imprinted on silicon chips in highly ordered patterns. The current pilot version is a 2-millimeter-by-2-millimeter mesh of silver nanowires connected by artificial synapses. Unlike silicon circuitry, with its geometric precision, this device is messy, like “a highly interconnected plate of noodles,” Stieg said. And instead of being designed, the fine structure of the UCLA device essentially organized itself out of random chemical and electrical processes.
Yet in its complexity, this silver mesh network resembles the brain. The mesh boasts 1 billion artificial synapses per square centimeter, which is within a couple of orders of magnitude of the real thing. The network’s electrical activity also displays a property unique to complex systems like the brain: “criticality,” a state between order and chaos indicative of maximum efficiency.
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Moreover, preliminary experiments suggest that this neuromorphic (brainlike) silver wire mesh has great functional potential. It can already perform simple learning and logic operations. It can clean the unwanted noise from received signals, a capability that’s important for voice recognition and similar tasks that challenge conventional computers. And its existence proves the principle that it might be possible one day to build devices that can compute with an energy efficiency close to that of the brain.
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One could run a whole country on the power of a[n incandescent] light bulb. Of course, Asimov claimed the Positronic brain was made from an alloy of platinum and iridium. Probably a calculated mis-direction?