And so it begins.

Think about the behavior of the colony. What does it do and when. How does the colony solve problems. That’s emergent behavior far beyond the capabilities of a single ant.

The byproduct is a sort of like salt water, but a lot more concentrated. It’s mostly NaCl, but there’s also various other anions and cations such as Al, Ca, Mg, K, SO4 etc. Those metals came from the ocean, so you might be inclined to think that you can dump them back into the ocean. The problem comes when you dump a lot of that stuff and you get very high concentrations locally. When the concentration of those compounds is within the normal range, sea life can handle it. Once it’s above the limit, you can expect things to struggle or die. Eventually, it will get diluted in the ocean, but before that the concentrations will be high enough to cause damage to most living things.

A group of brain cells begins to have emergent properties such as consciousness and intelligence. A group of human brains has similar emergent properties. An individual human mind wants this and that, but an entire human community will have completely different priorities.

I prefer to think of the human population on Earth as a single massive organism that spreads like the mycelia of a fungus. Individual cells have simple needs and goals, but the organism as a whole will do much more than just expand everywhere and extract nutrients.

Did you notice that the Average Lemmy Comments by Day looks really weird? Some of the sudden jumps could be attributed to real life events, but I’m more inclined to think there’s something buggy going on with the way three numbers are logged. Besides, there’s also a sudden dip!

In recent years I’ve been following the development of the energy storage industry. The latest video by Just Have a Think made me realize that an energy storage facility should use a variety of different technologies. Some would store energy for a few hours, some for days and some technologies would be used for seasonal energy storage.

I really think we need to start building these facilities. Not just pilot plants, but actual production scale facilities.

I think it also feels like magic because we haven’t developed much intuition about the way magnets work. If you had thousands or millions of magnetic items in your life, you would develop that intuition, which would shatter the magic. Obviously, not being able to see or feel magnetic fields plays a big role too.

For example, ropes, strings and cables are very familiar. You have a good intuitive understanding on how they work, because you’ve used them so much. There’s nothing magical about them. Imagine what it would be like if today is the first day when you learn to tie a knot. You could do completely magical things like attach two ropes together. You could even keep a box closed by tiring a rope around it. Pretty advanced stuff.

Yeah baby! Sign me up. Sounds awesome.

That might never happen if Twitter becomes as obscure as myspace or tumblr.

Keep on going. You’re good at this.

Next, try to come up with suitable branding for teaching stem literacy and critical thinking.

Microbes are incredibly versatile. If it’s even remotely possible to extract energy or nutrients from something, there’s a species for it. Too much salt for you? No problem for halophiles. Not enough air? No problem for the anaerobes. Too hot or too cold? Thermophiles and psychrophiles can handle it. Not enough nitrogen? Just pull it from the air! Oh, you need carbon too? Who needs glucose, when there’s CO2 in the air. Some even pull their energy from the oxidation reactions of arsene, sulfur or pretty much any element you can find on earth.

My guess is that it wasn’t Elon’s plan. The Saudis might want to take Twitter out of the picture to prevent another Arab spring from happening, and they found a way to do it through Elon.