From: Cory Przybyla (recherchetenet@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 04:31:41 MDT
> This make sense as a measure of energy = production.
> However, it fails
> to take into account inefficient technologies that
> consume more and
> produce less. A big explosion or supernova would
> consume more energy
> than real computing, for example.
My apologies...I meant to say ability to harness
energy. Perhaps even raw power in a given instance.
As how the with the advent of tools, our horsepower
went up about sixfold, social structures with tyrants
kicked it up again, the steam engine...at this point,
every year, a car comes out capable of greater
horsepower. Often in a smaller model. It is still
somewhat crude method, but it can give atleast a rough
estimate of where a society is going. Computing
times, lenghts of floating point numbers would be
another good argument to include right afterwards to
avoid extreme activists who consider energy
consumption intrinsically bad. Along with diminishing
size for them so one could show that science is
learning, exponentially, to harness more while also
doing so more efficiently, I guess.
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