Dear Reader

 Hello Dear Reader,

Sorry I am sort of doing a many worlds experiment with these blogs. Kind of annoying that I haven't really had these blogs collapse into a fascinating outcome.

Wonder what will happen. 

Guess there is only one way to find out.

* * *

When it comes to advancing a civilisation, two simple scales do the trick.

The Kardashev scale says all you have to do is use more energy as a civilisation and the Barrow scale says brush up on your ability to manipulate as small a piece of matter as possible.

In that regard, Quantum computing is a Barrow technology while Solar energy systems are a Kardashev technology.

The Very Big and The Very Small.

I do not know what put the idea in my head that I could play with things I could not do experiments on in a lab (you know, via meta ideas like apotheosis to a heaven-like world being powered by the hellish-like sun). 

I'm sort of the philosophy buff who dipped his toes into a little science and figured that was enough to feel all giddy. Maybe one day I'll first go soak up enough in a particular field.

But I can't help creating.

But it excites me in a reveletory sort of way. I like to occasionally think I feel similar to Archimedes who shouted 'Eureka', only he'd been in a really good place when he did (he was working on behalf of a King, he was a respectable scientist in a world that honoured science instead of preferring to listen to fairy tales all day long, etc) and I'm still looking for my good place.

BTW fairy tales today are not just the bible but Netflix and good novels. I am working through one right now.

In the case of Kardashev meeting Barrow, we do not have much to say by way of new technical details except maybe discuss what the state of the world looks like right now.

Right now, Big Fossil seems to be fighting Kardashev the more they block the energy transition to full-green whether they believe it or not. Though, I suspect Big Climate is wringing Big Fossil's hands in the wrong way and is more too blame. Meanwhile, the world of Barrow technologies (micro/nanotechnology e.g. GPUs, quantum computing and cellular/genetic biology) is promising radical scientific democracy with anybody being a tech or science god for chump change, but the promises are not yielding much fruit.

Artificial Intelligence (which sort of sits between Barrow and Kardashev and has up both sleeves) has gone through a bunch of scarring winters to become a scary new nemesis/super-power, but we trudge on. Quantum computing is snailing forward but humans are pretty hopeful - Google's Random Circuit Sampling trick feels like time travel to the year 2070.

Humans still have trust issues because we have cognitive bandwidth issues and so right now, there is no uniting human story to move us forward as a globe and we are sort of in a wait and see mode as we deal with the usual day to day needs - Russia-Ukraine war, supporting favourite local celebrities (Cindy vs Sheebah), watching Netflix (Hijack), reading good novels.

And so in light of all this mildness, one wonders whether to run off into mundanity like many a sane person, or to pursue the unknown end of these pretty unknown men's ideas.

Perhaps, I should work a little more on that allegorical metaphor. It has an entire fantasia packed into it.

We could start with a poem:

The sun powers human stuff

as the hellish powers the heavenly.

Do not give up when the going gets tough,

give down, though others haven't.

Well, that was something.