David GerardRoko puts self on ice floe, saving us the trouble
skillissuerah yes so he’s up to making aircraft carrier floating libertarian treehouse rube goldberg mad max platform out of pykrete
One idea for the bottom of the iceberg is to erect a grid of airtight barriers on the bottom of the berg, with cells a few dozen meters wide and a few meters tall and blow air bubbles into them
this makes this grid having to support several tons of buoyancy force, it will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so, and ice will probably deform over time. did all of these motherfuckers dropped out of middle school?
look, i think it’s up to all of us to have the imagination and foresight to support roko in this fabulous and important endeavour. we could lure patri friedman onto the same ice floe, for example, by the simple expedient of putting up a yellow and black flag with “no steppy on snek”
o7___o7It would give the orcas an opportunity to do the funniest possible thing
nah, he’ll never get there
all he can possibly do is to beg for money from givewell or whatever it’s called, then release a shitcoin to fund it, run a few prediction markets and hopefully at some point money cops will catch him
V0ldekit will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so
just flex tape it bro why you so negative
mkwtAs Tom and Ray would say (rest in peace), it’s too much course 8.
(Course 8 is the catalog number for the physics department at MIT.)
Besides, it’s been then tried already: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
Environmentalists are fond of saying that “There is no second Earth“. They are wrong! Here’s why:
There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.
Second Earth is a waterworld. It’s the vast Pacific Ocean that covers half the planet.
Well, he’s a little fuzzy on the concepts of halves and wholes, but let’s hear him out on colossal geoengineering projects.
the sequel to time cube, ice cube
You’ve tried cubes of time, but have you tried cubes of time, on ice?
blakestaceyThere is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.
“… Mister Bond.”
“I sunk your battleship thirty-five minutes ago.”
MiiOk, seriously, this is just Mortal Engines fan-fiction in an oceanpunk AU.
No, see that would be way cooler than this.
i like how he started on the premise that iceberg is cheap real estate, then okay let’s cover underside with thermal insulation, and also reinforce top with freshwater ice, that freshwater will be have to be transported there and then frozen in place, and also let’s cover top with expanded glass and concrete, and let’s put wood pulp and basalt fiber rebar in ice, and
all while never counting beans, and any and all numbers are entirely pulled out of his ass
even on lesswrong the guy going through his numbers for how concrete behaves
Roko even said the ‘I think agricultural waste products like straw can be substituted for sawdust so maybe you are paid to take it off their hands.[emph mine]’ line. which is always a good sign when somebody is trying to the economically feasible math.
yeah let’s just divert entire global straw output so that Roko can build his libertarian crypto paradise
also straw is not a waste, wtf is he thinking
AllNewTypeFaceMaybe he was thinking of straw that has already been through the horse?
Ahh, horseshit. It is a key libertarian building block.
New form of pykrete made out of manure and ice. Eventually the Icebertarians will get use to the smell (an AI company is also working on a CRISPR fix), and with the problems of excessive manure and thus nitrate in places like the Netherlands, you are paid to take it off their hands! Win win!
A Turdburg on a turdberg. It might not be a shining city on a hill, but it would have high albedo.
Oh, it would shine. Like shit on a barn door.
Charlie Stross@Soyweiser Why not make pykrete out of neoreactionaries?
They’d have to classify a proportion of themselves as subhuman first, and then they could make history’s most literal implementation of the mudsill theory.
Time to Cronenberg it up. Anybody want a new appartment in Roko the skyscraper? Long live the new flesh! No pets!
All hail the new flesh! No pets!
I’m ded
Next time I’m first going to look up the quote (which is apparently 'Long live the new flesh!") before posting, but you have immortalized my error. :)
It’s hard for me to even imagine a more apt description of a privileged silver-spoon moron than thinking straw is waste and people would pay you to get rid of it.
Human minds are amazing, I can’t even hypothesise what thought processes, if any, led him there
And even if it was waste, that you are planning to build megastructures with it makes it no longer waste very quickly, and as there was no demand for the product before and now it is in high demand, the price will prob do some very interesting things. A suggestion was made to use sugarcane bagasse which has no other use it seems. But that would then also quickly get a use and increase in price, which would also do things to the price of replacement products, like sawdust, or straw. And I assume that if the price of straw in the world rises a lot due to this megaconstruction a lot of farmers would be unhappy, but yeah fuck the poor countries.
flaviaEven if it was waste, the sellers would notice and start charging for it. Libertarians have a fucked up definition of what ‘waste’ also with bitcoin mining.
straw goes for something like $70-100 per ton (in poland; depends on region and other factors) sawdust is probably cheaper
Just program the godlike AI to turn everything into pykrete instead of paperclips.
Problem solved.
BigMuffin69this is literally the dumbest shit I’ve read all week and it’s been a pretty dumb week
Yes, good plan, the ozone layer hole craves more skin cancer sacrifices.
He does mention that you’ll need a military to defend your borders, though of course he’s more concerned about opportunistic “legacy governments” taking his iceborne super country away from him rather than pirates showing up to fish anything valuable out of the sea as it all predictably and rapidly falls apart.
Yeah this new ‘military’ setup will also quicly lead to them being seen as pirates by ‘legacy governments’ (who tend to love armed groups showing up, esp near any shipping lanes (if he wants to live anywhere away from the damaged ozone layer (the south of the south pacific seems somewhat empty at least). And the various groups of people in this new libertarian utopia (I’m going to assume it is libertarian) will surely not start preying on each other, or those nice ‘legacy’ shipping going round. At least 4 people will call themselves Ragnar Danneskjöld.
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but will USN wipe out half of their fleet in a single shift if they bother commercial shipping enough? (operations room)
America Obliterates Half Of Iran's Navy In 8 Hours! - Operation Praying Mantis
I meant more like treating the icelibertarians like the Houthis and tossing a few missiles into the iceskyscrapers than that kind of what I assume is USA military fanwank video.
Who needs missiles when a few parabolic mirrors will do the job?
A million red-hot tungsten balls.
Houthis have been bombed with every weapon at saudi air force disposal for almost decade by now
Yes, and they are still around, same with the Taliban, but for some reason I doubt the Icebertarians will be that anti-fragile. As soon as the first Icebertarian becomes homeless and sets up a tent they will bail. “I’m fine with them doing drugs in their homes, but now they are doing drugs and not even coding javascript! I cant bear it!”
Nah, that would only happen if they touched our boats.
Or if we thought they touched our boats.
Or if something wholly unrelated happened to one of our boats nearby and it was politically convenient to say they had touched our boats even if they didn’t actually have much reason to at the time.
Yes, good plan, the ozone layer hole craves more skin cancer sacrifices.
Sun can’t get you if you don’t go outside taps noggin
Ha, do you think The Hole didn’t think of that? It consumes!
by the way, when was the last time when rats got their lives or limbs in danger by testing their stupid ideas? instead of, you know, asking someone who knows beforehand? probably something weird happened to people testing these anti-cavity bacteria, but nothing really serious i guess. that was maybe half year ago or so
Amoeba_GirlLook, I already knew Roko was a moron but this is outrageous.
See what’s really fun here is that once again the libertarians are blissfully unaware their natural predator, bears.
This is so funny. Every time they are given what they want the infrastructure crumbles to the point of being dangerous, and then the bears come to finish them off. Just ordinary bears are deadly enough for libertarians to LARP a Jurassic Park speedrun.
I guarantee that if there is a libertarian space colony, all of their life support systems will be contaminated by mutant tardigrades (aka water bears)
Wow, amazing story. Same thing actually happened to a friend of mine
(But srsly, I enjoyed that.)
That was a good read
Tap for spoilerI did predict the twist, when they mentioned a completely safe quarantine zone. Nothing ever goes perfectly well with stories built on apocalyptic premises. But reading it still gave me chills. Excellent delivery.
sc_griffithextremely funny that none of his interlocutors bother asking what his engineering background is like
careful with questions about formal education like this, you might offend Dear Leader
Don’t worry Roko has the support of the best mind of our generation behind him: Roko: “Elon is absolutely right that Tunnels[sic] would solve traffic”
Yes, we’ve had vertical cities with economic class strata, but have we had frigid vertical cities with economic class strata? This is an incredible innovation in the dystopian novel genre.
@barsquid Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)
(I did NOT expect to learn that Roko is ripping off J. G. Ballard for ideas.)
