troyunrau

Meet one of my former D&D characters: Kronos, master of space and time (chronurgy wizard), accidentally turned himself into a grung while experimenting on frog familiars. Jokes that he is his own familiar now. Also has a frog familiar. Claims it is himself from another timeline. Campaign goal: to recover his lost powers. Secret: is delusional, or is he?

Someone at Goodwill hates you right now :)

I'm no neuroscientist (just a regular scientist who happens to know a little about neurology). But those quotes are entirely speculation. Dealing first with the premise of the comic:

(1) The comic has the chip loading arbitrary memories into a person's brain. In order to do that, we would have to have a total map of the person's brain and then craft a memory that fits into it. The processing power and the number of interconnections to have a total map are entirely in the realm of science fiction for the foreseeable future. Neuralink is advertising 1024 electrodes. To pull this off you would need trillions of electrodes.

(2) Furthermore, you'd need to have a computer craft the precise stimulus response mapped to an individuals unique neural network -- that would mean that a computer will have had to completely decode their entire brain and memories first, or at a minimum be able to simulate their entire brain. And then run a bunch of forward models trying to fit the new data into the existing data in a seamless way. Yes, theoretically possible given infinite computing power, but not actually practical.

(3) The first two require major leaps in technology beyond neuralink itself. Probably you're looking at borg style nano-machines in order to pull off this level of neural integration and the processing power to map, understand, and model an entire brain (NVIDIA isn't going to cut it, even projecting Moore's law decades down the road).

(4) In conclusion, Elon will never be able to pull this off the comic before he dies.

Now, if you assume Elon is extrapolating into the far future.

(5) saving and replaying memories might be easier, because you don't have to map and entire brain (just a section), and you don't have to model the brain to create the memory -- just restimulate the same neurons. This is probable, with or without Neuralink, as a technological advancement in probably decades.

(6) Likewise, copying an existing brain into a new or simulated brain is easier than injecting a memory into an existing brain. You'd still need to have another "blank brain" as a host (whatever form that entails), and you'd need enough data from your real brain to make the copy (well, that brings us back to items 2&3). This is probable, with or without Neuralink, as a technological advancement in probably centuries.

Neither 5 nor 6 help with the premise of the comic. But I suppose if we have the tech to do (6) in a few centuries, we could probably have the computing power to model new memories on an individual basis too.

Elon will be dead by then.

warshter

Look at those smiling eyes!

Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc -- and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger -- fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life -- most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don't get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it's no nuke.

So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they're probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn't.

How to get Starship cancelled. Asking for a ~~senator~~ friend

Or desert islands

Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.

You're correct. They are the same. Loan may also apply.

However, depending on where you are, there are regional differences in where the terms get used. Locally, you rent an apartment but lease a warehouse (why?). Also, if you rent an apartment and turn over your lease agreement to another person, you are sub-letting the apartment. And "let" also means lease in this context. Err rent. Fuck, I've gone cross-eyed