Prediction Markets to STOMP Centralized Manhattan Projects [re: Funding, OpenHW/SW/Nets/...]
On 7/31/22, someone <@yahoo.com.au> pasted:
https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1291237571461169153
Cypherpunks have been proposing these things for decades, including any number of ways to do so under new models that preserve voluntary freedom. Yet the above linked proposal (in text form below)... - Asks that dependency and mandate continue upon Govt as money middleman, thus implying submitting to and asking permission from Govt to do that which can already be done yourselves without Govt. - Arbitrarily gives your money (which is still stolen from you by Govt therein) to some pre-existing named pet project groups whose older products and structures might not otherwise rank under a new open competition. This is often called Pork. - Does not mention how to remain free to voluntarily choose what parts or none that you want your money going to when, or how to create or send to something else you prefer outside that seemingly mandatory forced funnel. Now Cypherpunks, being a more free sort, might proffer that much of this through an open competition, where anyone may create and send their proposals out into a Distributed P2P Proposal Browsing and Prediction Market to seek funding and fulfillment of the better ones among them therein. Even randomized distribution of no-strings awards to anyone who produces unspecified basic research and work product that could be used towards a particular larger goal, can be done this way. Crypto market cap was ~$3T and will be again soon, even today $20B is nothing for crypto whales and millions of others alike that are each together seeking destinations for philanthropy and investment that suits them. " https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1291228563677429760 My proposed alternative to this stupid "Clean Network" thing: the Cyber-Security Through Openness Manhattan Project (C-STOMP) - $5 billion into open source hardware development, including no-strings-attached grants to Librem, Pinephone and similar groups - $5 billion into security-focused operating systems, including improvement of existing OSes and no-strings-attached grants to Qubes developers - $5 billion into a fully open source 5G alternative - $5 billion into redundant internet networking infrastructure with a focus on resisting attacks and satisfying the original vision of making an internet that can survive nuclear war Pay for all of the above by redirecting 25% of the NSA's budget (that's $10b * 0.25 per year) over the next eight years. " "Cypherpunks wrote: #OpenFabs , #OpenHW , #OpenAudit , #FormalVerification , #CryptoCrowdFunding , #OpenTrust , #GuerrillaNets , ... " Crypto makes going to Mars, ending wars, helping charity, fusion energy, medical advances, and indeed whatever good things, possible sooner, by routing around legacy obstructions, and increasing the addressibility for project choices and funding out to everyone around the globe. The positive change that crypto will bring should not be underestimated or stifled.
Prediction Markets would instantly bump this to $50B... Investors Have Now Spent $5 Billion Pursuing The "Holy Grail Of Energy" https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/about-fusion-industry https://tracxn.com/d/trending-themes/Startups-in-Nuclear-Fusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIRdKDMhGUQ What do The Dark Knight Rises, Back to the Future, Oblivion, and Interstellar all have in common? They are sci-fi blockbusters that showcase a technology that scientists consider to be the Holy Grail of Energy: Nuclear fusion. Theoretically, two lone nuclear reactors running on small pellets could power the entire planet, safely and cleanly. That’s the promise of nuclear fusion. So, why are we still relying on fossil fuels? What’s stopping us from building these reactors everywhere? After all, scientists have been working on nuclear fusion technology since the 1950s and have always been optimistic that the final breakthrough is not far away. Yet, milestones have fallen time and again and now the running joke is that a practical nuclear fusion power plant could still be decades away. Well, the past few years have witnessed a resurgence in the field with a handful of startups setting up shop to make nuclear fusion an everyday reality. Interestingly, the vast majority of the sector’s funding has come from the private sector rather than public investments. According to the second global fusion industry report published by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA), private investment in fusion technology hit $4.7 billion in total, dwarfing the $117 million of public investment. Also, the current year is proving to be a watershed moment for fusion technology, with the amount of funding in 2022 more than doubling the industry's entire historic investment to the tune of $2.83 billion. Fusion Startups To date, Commonwealth Fusion Systems has bagged the largest amount of funding for a fusion startup. Back in December, the Massachusetts-based fusion startup snagged more than $1.8 billion in the largest private investment for nuclear fusion yet from a plethora of big-name investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, George Soros via his Soros Fund Management LLC, and venture capitalist John Doerr. Commonwealth Fusion System is in good company. On Nov. 5, Helion Energy announced that it had raised $500 million in its latest fundraising round, making it the second-largest-ever single fundraising round for a private fusion firm. Helion has a chance to surpass Commonwealth Fusion System since its latest round of funding includes an additional $1.7 billion tied to certain performance milestones. Meanwhile, Canada’s General Fusion has closed a $130 million fundraising round that was oversubscribed. General Fusion plans to launch an even bigger fundraising effort soon. Google and Chevron participated in a $250-million funding raise for TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion startup with an unconventional strategy, back in June. Since then, TAE has raised a total of $1.2 billion. “It’s a sign of the industry growing up," General Fusion Chief Executive Christofer Mowry has told the Wall Street Journal. Various fusion companies are pursuing different designs for fusion reactors, though the majority rely on fusion that takes place in plasma. Commonwealth Fusion has successfully tested the most powerful fusion magnet of its kind on Earth that would hold and compress the plasma. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their fusion reactor. The team has planned a fusion experiment they have dubbed Sparc which is about 1/65th the volume of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The experimental reactor will generate about 100MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds - bursts big enough to power a small city. The team anticipates that the output will be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma thus overcoming the biggest technical hurdle in the field: positive net energy from fusion. The Sparc team has set an ambitious target to have the reactor running in about 15 years. But why have scientists so far failed at replicating a natural process that powers the stars in our universe? Extreme Challenge Turns out that the conditions necessary for nuclear fusion to take place present an extreme challenge for us earthlings. Fusion works on the basic concept of forging lighter elements into heavier ones. When two hydrogen atoms are smashed together hard enough, they fuse to form helium. The new atom is less massive than the sum of its parts, with the balance converted to energy in the E=MC2 mass-energy equivalence. Ok, that’s a bit simplistic since hydrogen atoms do not fuse together directly but rather in a multi-step reaction. Anyway, the long and short of it is that nuclear fusion produces net energy only at extreme temperatures - in the order of hundreds of millions of degrees celsius. That’s hotter than the sun’s core and far too hot for any known material on earth to withstand. To get around this quagmire, scientists use powerful magnetic fields to contain the hot plasma and prevent it from coming into contact with the walls of the nuclear reactor. That consumes insane amounts of energy. Stars have it easy in this regard thanks to their immense masses and powerful gravitational fields that hold everything together. For instance, the sun is 333,000 times the mass of the Earth with a gravity ~27.9 times that of Earth. Unfortunately, every fusion experiment so far has been energy negative, taking in more energy than it generates thus making it useless as a form of electricity generation. Getting the initial fusion reaction is not a problem - keeping it going is, not to mention that building nuclear reactors takes some extremely sophisticated feats of engineering. International Megaproject But now scientists are confident that they are close to building a nuclear reactor that will produce more energy than it consumes. The Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France-based upcoming International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the world’s largest fusion reaction facility that aims to develop commercially viable fusion reactors. Funded by six nations including the US, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and India, ITER plans to build the world’s largest tokamak fusion device, a donut-shaped cage that will produce 500 ME of thermal fusion energy. The device will cost ~$24 billion with a delivery date set at 2035. The giant machine - the biggest fusion machine ever built - will weigh in at an impressive 23,000 tonnes and will be housed in a building 60 meters high. So, what’s different this time around? Scientists have successfully developed a new superconducting material - essentially a steel tape coated with yttrium-barium-copper oxide, or YBCO, which allows them to build smaller and more powerful magnets. This lowers the energy required to get the fusion reaction off the ground. According to Fusion for Energy - the EU’s joint undertaking for ITER - 18 niobium-tin superconducting magnets aka toroidal field coils will be used to contain the 150 million degrees celsius plasma. The powerful magnets will generate a powerful magnetic field equal to 11.8 tesla, or a million times stronger than the earth's magnetic field. Europe will manufacture 10 of the toroidal field coils with Japan manufacturing nine. However, it will be another decade before a full-scale demonstration power plant will be built using lessons learned from ITER. The industrial fusion power plants will thereafter be connected to the grid. The ITER site construction is nearly 80% complete. With all that said… it seems nuclear fusion remains (but hopefully not forever) over a decade away.
Putting massive optical and radio telescopes in space, rebuilding Arecibo, launching faster probes out the solar system, space and land based guerrilla networks, health care, roads, education, research, food, whatever people want to do... Prediction Markets are the future of crowdfunding, and they conveniently obsolete such needless and inefficient government in the process. All The Contents Of The Universe, In One Graphic https://www.visualcapitalist.com/composition-of-the-universe https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/map-of-the-entire-known-universe/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/nature-timespiral-the-evolution-of-earth... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/extreme-temperatures-in-the-universe/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/30-years-hubble-discoveries/ https://astronomy.com/news/magazine/2021/01/the-beginning-to-the-end-of-the-... Scientists agree that the universe consists of three distinct parts: everyday visible (or measurable) matter, and two theoretical components called dark matter and dark energy. As Visual Capitalists's Mark Belan explains below, these last two are theoretical because they have yet to be directly measured - but even without a full understanding of these mysterious pieces to the puzzle, scientists can infer that the universe’s composition can be broken down as follows: Let’s look at each component in more detail. Dark Energy Dark energy is the theoretical substance that counteracts gravity and causes the rapid expansion of the universe. It is the largest part of the universe’s composition, permeating every corner of the cosmos and dictating how it behaves and how it will eventually end. Dark Matter Dark matter, on the other hand, has a restrictive force that works closely alongside gravity. It is a sort of “cosmic cement” responsible for holding the universe together. Despite avoiding direct measurement and remaining a mystery, scientists believe it makes up the second largest component of the universe. Free Hydrogen and Helium Free hydrogen and helium are elements that are free-floating in space. Despite being the lightest and most abundant elements in the universe, they make up roughly 4% of its total composition. Stars, Neutrinos, and Heavy Elements All other hydrogen and helium particles that are not free-floating in space exist in stars. Stars are one of the most populous things we can see when we look up at the night sky, but they make up less than one percent—roughly 0.5%—of the cosmos. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are similar to electrons, but they are nearly weightless and carry no electrical charge. Although they erupt out of every chemical reaction, they account for roughly 0.3% of the universe. Heavy elements are all other elements aside from hydrogen and helium. Elements form in a process called nucleosynthesis, which takes places within stars throughout their lifetimes and during their explosive deaths. Almost everything we see in our material universe is made up of these heavy elements, yet they make up the smallest portion of the universe: a measly 0.03%. How Do We Measure the Universe? In 2009, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a space observatory called Planck to study the properties of the universe as a whole. Its main task was to measure the afterglow of the explosive Big Bang that originated the universe 13.8 billion years ago. This afterglow is a special type of radiation called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). Temperature can tell scientists much about what exists in outer space. When investigating the “microwave sky”, researchers look for fluctuations (called anisotropy) in the temperature of CMBR. Instruments like Planck help reveal the extent of irregularities in CMBR’s temperature, and inform us of different components that make up the universe. You can see below how the clarity of CMBR changes over time with multiple space missions and more sophisticated instrumentation. What Else is Out There? Scientists are still working to understand the properties that make up dark energy and dark matter. NASA is currently planning a 2027 launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared telescope that will hopefully help us in measuring the effects of dark energy and dark matter for the first time. As for what’s beyond the universe? Scientists aren’t sure. There are hypotheses that there may be a larger “super universe” that contains us, or we may be a part of one “island” universe set apart from other island multiverses. Unfortunately we aren’t able to measure anything that far yet. Unravelling the mysteries of the deep cosmos, at least for now, remains a local endeavor.
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