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Tag Archive for future

Carbon sequestration

February 9, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Carbon sequestration

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150205/ncomms7124/full/ncomms7124.html

This one kindof fascinates the hell outta me.  For a while there, the idea of carbon sequestration was a “brass ring” idea for the scientists I associate with.  Solve the problem, and your future (and the future of the planet, obviously) are secure.  But carbon is kindof a bitch.  It doesn’t like very many things, so finding effective and efficient ways to not only scrub carbon out of the atmosphere, but to store it so it doesn’t get BACK into the atmosphere, is not as easy a task as you might think.

The big magic trick for a while was iron-enrichment (many authors have worked with this idea in their fiction).  The theory (in very basic layman’s terms) was you seed patches of ocean with iron filings (which are freaking *everywhere* and the resultant algae/plankton bloom will consume carbon dioxide and make it into their tiny tiny skeletons.  Then, when they die off, their tiny bodies float to the seafloor, taking the carbon with them and storing it away.

It works, after a fashion (it’s hard to nail down just how well without more formalized testing) but there are not only potential risks, but there is accountability as well.  Dumping shiploads of iron filings out into international waters means, if something goes wrong (say the bloom runs out of control, washes up on an island and kills their economy by suffocating the ocean ecosystem offshore) then with whom does the responsibility lie.  And does it matter (because deep pockets cannot magically repair dead fisheries, that takes lots of time).

So this new solution works around that.  Rather than the uncertainty of tweaking with biological processes, we can go straight to the source.  These beads can be installed in the sources of man-made atmospheric carbon, meaning it can be tracked and accounted for, controlled and measured.

If this could be done for a reasonable (consumer-level) cost, it could simply be a game changer, not only for factory-level pollution, but in developing countries (or in some cases, developed countries) where coal stoves are used for warmth in households, or diesel engines drive land and sea transport (okay, yes, to use it on a train might require some extra engineering, this is true).

As always, the link on top will take you to the paper in question so you can see for yourself (rather than just relying on my commentary)

One foot in front of the other.

February 6, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on One foot in front of the other.

Walkers

http://rednuht.org/genetic_walkers/

 

Using simple evolutionary systems in games can often be a way to develop worthwhile opponents in a reasonably short period of time.  When I was working with Blue Planet Software while they were in production an RTS called “Hanesakegassen” they began to set up “AI’s” to play against one another, over and over.  Each new version of the bot got to keep what the previous bot had recorded with regards to tactics.  What worked, what didn’t.  They (the bots) didn’t really ever know the *why* they just knew that the blue opponent always spent an extra minute collecting ammo, or that the green opponent hated to fortify areas with water.

The HTML tool above is a simple (by which i mean clean and straightforward, the code behind it is probably more complex than I can parse) example of this.  A bipedial, jointed figures is trying to “learn” to walk.  The most successful ones are copied and try again.  And again.  And again.

 

 

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