News on China's scientific and technological development.

Appix

Senior Member
Registered Member
Last edited:

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
What come next is amazing. the robot has database and can find the gas tank cap, unscrew it and directed the gas nozzle to the tank , screw back the cap and close the lid. all while it avoid bumping into car or person

Gas station robot is being piloted in China | 加油站機器人正在中國試點​

14,734 views
Sep 13, 2021
 

Nutrient

Junior Member
Registered Member
This isn’t big because of the biochemical synthesis. We can already make synthetic carbs, proteins, fats, etc. This is big because of the CO2 sequestration process.

If we eat the synthetic starch, the CO2 sequestration won't be permanent: our bodies will convert the starch back to CO2. If the world stops using fossil fuels (quite possible, see below), the excess carbon won't be problematic anyway.

No, as @siegecrossbow implies, the new process could be big as it could save an enormous amount of land and fresh water. It could also make plenty of food in China even if the weather is bad.

Probably the major input will be energy. We can generate it using solar power: using less than 10% of the Gobi Desert's area, solar panels can produce enough power to satisfy all of Earth's needs (18 terawatts), even if we use inefficent solar panels (15%), and even at Gobi's high latitude.

The major problem will be storing all that power for the night, which is why I like Solar Power Satellites (SPSs). However, the starch synthesizers probably won't care if power shuts down half the time.
 

j17wang

Senior Member
Registered Member
What come next is amazing. the robot has database and can find the gas tank cap, unscrew it and directed the gas nozzle to the tank , screw back the cap and close the lid. all while it avoid bumping into car or person

Gas station robot is being piloted in China | 加油站機器人正在中國試點​

14,734 views
Sep 13, 2021

Robot for robot sake... LOL. This wont save any time but should be a tourist attraction in every major chinese city.
 

latenlazy

Brigadier
If we eat the synthetic starch, the CO2 sequestration won't be permanent: our bodies will convert the starch back to CO2. If the world stops using fossil fuels (quite possible, see below), the excess carbon won't be problematic anyway.

No, as @siegecrossbow implies, the new process could be big as it could save an enormous amount of land and fresh water. It could also make plenty of food in China even if the weather is bad.

Probably the major input will be energy. We can generate it using solar power: using less than 10% of the Gobi Desert's area, solar panels can produce enough power to satisfy all of Earth's needs (18 terawatts), even if we use inefficent solar panels (15%), and even at Gobi's high latitude.

The major problem will be storing all that power for the night, which is why I like Solar Power Satellites (SPSs). However, the starch synthesizers probably won't care if power shuts down half the time.
I recognize the benefits of land and water use too. But starch isn’t just food stuff. It can be starter material for other chemicals. Furthermore, even if you can consume all the starches you create to release CO2 back into the atmosphere, you now have a potential way to piggyback off an industrial process to lock some of that carbon away. Basically this process gives you a way to have fine control over the atmospheric carbon cycle that is integrated into an industrial loop that may be economically viable.
 

Fedupwithlies

Junior Member
Registered Member
What do you guys think? I heavily dislike that China banned gene editing. That is a very exiting field with potentially world transformational consequences. Very risk averse from China and this risk averse behaviour had enormous negative impact in the past.




Gonna see how closely the law is written and if there's a change in the future. Right now, there's not really any value in trying to create "designer babies" - we just don't have the know-how. Any attempt is probably brute-force and experimental, and legitimately unethical.

However, research into genetics and human genetics is incredibly valuable, and if they banned that... that would be an own-goal. If they're still allowing stem-cell research, human cell research, genome mapping and testing, then it might not be a bad thing, preventing the sort of mad-scientist and wasteful research that you can find in the Soviet Union and the United States at the height of the cold war.

Dunno about crypto, don't know enough about it. But yea, "designer baby" and "human genetics" research aren't the same thing. There's some space between them. How and where the law comes down is going to be pretty important.

The UNZ article is... pretty crank. At least the very short "bio-singularity" bit... The "gene-edited baby" he mentions is just looking at the genes of embryos and choosing what "seems" to be the healthiest... which even then is imperfect. There's a lot more that can be improved and epigenetics is a growing field which has a lot of potential on people's health as well.

That said, it is with genetic research that we can recognize the genetic markers for various diseases and there will be a day when having the genes for various diseases will be edited out of an embryo. In fact today there are abortions happening because the fetus has genetic markers for a whole host of diseases, so what they're doing is just shifting the choice earlier in the baby-making process. This is probably going to be the next step and is a good thing - and if China's law stops this then yea, thats a bad thing.

But reading the language of the law, it just seems they've stopped human embryo gene-editing research, not animal research. Which is good, because we're still not nearly close to being able to do that safely.

This gene-selection thing should be ok since there's no gene-editing going on.

Overall, I don't see any useful research (that I know of, but I'm not in that field) being stopped with this new law.
 

sinophilia

Junior Member
Registered Member
I know this isn't China-related but I hope China watches this space ASAP.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This shouldn't be a 'first' in America, if they start designing their kids to be 180 IQ John Von Neumann's the relative difference between Anglos (or anyone else who uses this technology) and China will be greater than the difference between China and India today, probably greater than the difference between China and Zimbabwe today.

Edit: The company that did this is American, led by an ethnic Chinese that is pro-China (LOL)


1632553813977.png


Here is the most recent article on his blog:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 

Fedupwithlies

Junior Member
Registered Member
I know this isn't China-related but I hope China watches this space ASAP.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This shouldn't be a 'first' in America, if they start designing their kids to be 180 IQ John Von Neumann's the relative difference between Anglos (or anyone else who uses this technology) and China will be greater than the difference between China and India today, probably greater than the difference between China and Zimbabwe today.

Edit: The company that did this is American, led by an ethnic Chinese that is pro-China (LOL)


View attachment 77512

As far as I can tell the ban won't do anything to stop research along these lines.

Of course, at some point in the future the ban will need to be reversed, but as it is now we don't know what genes impact IQ and research should still be allowed in that field. Any attempt to gene-edit higher IQ (or really, most other "desirable traits" is doomed to fail right now.
 

Overbom

Brigadier
Registered Member
if they start designing their kids to be 180 IQ John Von Neumann's the relative difference between Anglos (or anyone else who uses this technology) and China will be greater than the difference between China and India today, probably greater than the difference between China and Zimbabwe today.
The Americans are welcome to try to do that. Indeed, they are welcome to try that and unintentionally create a whole population of cripples.

The science on this is too new for any country to adopt such measures. Dunno, maybe in 15-20 years it could be done
 
Top