Holographic Universe

So I've seen in several places that a large group of scientists are talking to the press about the possibility that the entire universe may be some sort of hologram or simulation.   Amateur philosophers quickly run to their armchairs to talk about what this means, so I think I need to weigh in as well.
Holography comes from greek words meaning "whole image."  It's a way of recording something 3 dimensional on a 2d surface.   The typical holograms that we interact with day to day are made by shining a laser off the object to record onto film.   The film then develops a complicated photograph that, when that same laser is shined back on it, reproduces a ghostly 3d image of the original subject.
A similar idea floated in philosophy is that the universe is a simulation, or a dream.   These ideas are hardly new -- most Hindu sects were proposing this well over 3 thousand years ago.   Other religions like Buddhism and Christian Science also are very attached to the idea that the universe is a dream or in some other way not the true objective reality.
So, if the universe is some sort of hologram, what would it mean?

Well, for starters, what is it encoded on?   Could we change this encoding?   More importantly, could we change a small part of this encoding without screwing everything else up?  If so...free planets for everyone!

Suddenly huge amounts of physics would cease to be relevant, as we could screw around with the original medium to travel faster than light, reverse entropy, and other patent nonsense.

If not...well, it's an interesting idea, but with no practical implication to our lives, it's relegated to the realms of philosophy to be endlessly argued about by various bizarre factions.

On a similar note, if the universe was some sort of simulation, I think I'd use my programming knowledge to cheat like crazy:

struct wallet{
   *plasticrectangle creditcards[8];
   *paperrectangles money;
   *plasticrectangle id;
   *foldedpaper carinsurance;
}

money=1000000000000000;
}

Whereupon my wallet promptly explodes due to Pauli principle violations and I use the proceeds to buy a new wallet, house, car, and secret laboratories in Tahiti, Hawaii, the moon, and Mars.

This could also be used to teleport things and people:

struct location
{
float x;
float y;
float z;
}

home.location=self.location(x), self.location(y), self.location(z);

I could now arbitrarily teleport myself home:

self.location=home;

I guess what I'm trying to say is that these ideas are interesting, if a little impractical.

Tree Math

I haven't had a lot of time lately, but I ran the math on my plan to solve global warming by planting trees, using Wolfram Alpha, which has access to significantly more figures than I do.  I'm not encouraged.

Taking the most extreme position possible, suppose we covered the entire land surface of the earth with Pawlonia Tormentosa, a fast growing, carbon sucking tree.   These trees are planted every 25 feet across every part of the earth not covered in water.   Homes, businesses, farms, freeways, and anything else we want to do on the earth is buried beneath.  This works out to 1.12 trillion trees.

Each tree sucks, over the course of about 7 years, about 3*10⁶ grams of carbon straight out of the air.   At this point, it can be cut down and it will regrow from its own stump.   The wood would then have to be not burned, but instead either buried or made into objects that we plan to keep for a while, such as houses.  Based on the weight of the wood, the number of trees, Wolfram Alpha found that every seven year cycle would suck, assuming I didn't make a decimal point error here, 74 parts per million of carbon dioxide out of the air.   In this time, human activity would replace another 35 ppm, what with all the coal and oil we've been burning.   To reduce the carbon levels from the current high of 393ppm to the pre-industrial level of 180 ppm would take 7 cycles of this -- 49 years.

This isn't going to happen.   Much of the earth could not sustain a forest so thick that the branches of neighboring trees touch.   There's deserts, where the trees would die from lack of water, mountains where the trees sap would freeze so hard that the tree would literally explode, beaches where the salted earth would drain the moisture back to the soil, killing the tree.   We could not move our farms underground without an explosive increase of our energy use to keep our farms lit and alive, not to mention watered.   And if we're not willing to install solar panels and drive hybrids for the sake of the earth, we certainly aren't willing to live like murlocks in little caves.   We like the sun and the breeze and the other amenities of the surface world.

The best solution is clearly a compromise between these insane extremes.    More solar, less coal, trees where it makes sense, wooden structures where it doesn't.    Slow the change to the point where we can adapt to it as it comes.

Water Cloud Jovian

According to astronomers, one of the more commonly discovered planets that we've seen in the universe is the Water cloud Jovian -- imagine Jupiter, but in the earth's orbit. Under higher temperatures, the brown and orange stained ammonia clouds evaporate, and are replaced with fluffy white clouds, the kind seen in the earth's sky. The planet enjoys earth-like temperatures (based on radiation calculations), and if you could somehow visit one, you'd see sky above, and sky below, ending in a blue void. Artists have drawn, from the scientist's description of the conditions, what one would look like from the view of an air vehicle flying through the upper atmosphere, and it is remarkably beautiful.

Jovian planets would also be useful industrially. Although this beautiful air would choke you to death, plants could live in this environment without difficulty, and the strong magnetic field allows light in while shutting out much of the more harmful radiation of a star. A farm in such an environment would be a very useful thing, if you could get it on a floating, balloon hoisted platform. With effectively ten earths of space, you could grow quite a bit of stuff. The planet is also rich in chemicals like methane and ammonia, and hydrocarbon synthesis would also prove valuable as industries. Much of a Jovian planet's hydrogen is actually in the form of pure H₂, which is quite chemically valuable (as well as dangerously explosive, so it would have to be kept separate from the breathable air.)

These industries would be able to bootstrap from small balloon-hoisted platforms into larger platforms, into connecting the platforms. While getting the end-products out of the immense gravity well would prove challenging, a successful farm would also be a good place to start a colony -- independence and cheap food would prove a draw to quite a lot of people. The plants would, over time, terraform the planet and increase the industrial usability of the planet's remaining hydrocarbons. Although metal would be in short supply, there being effectively none other than what the colonists bring with them when they arrive, all the plastic you want could be synthesized out of, effectively the planetary air, farming will be super easy, Earth can't attack you, and you can never, ever leave. Anarco-primitivists would love it, as would the more agricultural sectors of French society.

Over time, I think these floating platforms would expand to cover the planet, with each new immigrant group bringing another platform, and extensions being woven from wood and plastic. In a few strategic spots, a hole is deliberately left for the view, but elsewhere, cities spring up, farms grow enough food to literally cover the entire surface of the earth, and people live their lives.

It'd be awesome. Also, impractically distant, as the closest known water cloud Jovian planet is about 41 light-years away, not to mention the usual preposterous costs of any space travel at all.

Reincarnation Theory

The most common theme in all of the world's religions is that death is not the end of existence. This is not universal, and a few religions actually do teach that death is the end. Many religions describe a second world for the departed. Another common idea is that the dead are reborn as new people, an idea called reincarnation. Various religions describe various reasons why this should happen, and how it would work, usually positing that you have a soul that is moved from body to body. The Dalai Lama wasfamously asked by Carl Sagan if given proof, would he cease to believe in reincarnation, which is a major component of his religion. He answered that yes, proof was proof and believing untrue things was like lying to yourself. He added that it would prove very difficult to disprove reincarnation. I bring this up because about a week ago I was reading an article about a psychologist in the 1960s who hypnotized a large number of people in California and asked them if they could remember of past life. To her great surprise, many reported that they could, describing the food, clothing, and customers of a 30 to 70 year life. She then compared the reports to actual historical records, finding them to be accurate about 85% of the time. The new page community, whose religion teaches reincarnation, immediately jumped on this study as proof of reincarnation. The most commonly reported past life was World War II era Chinese, suggesting a period of less than 10 years between lives. Assuming that all of this true, it makes sense to my understanding of history. America and China were allies in the war, and to a Chinese person of this time, their ally, "Meiguo," as they called America, was far from their enemies, rich beyond all their wildest dreams, and powerful. If dead people reincarnated and had a choice as to where they would be reborn, America would be a tempting choice for a dead Chinese person. China would have been their first choice, but they would probably be afraid to return to where their enemies still had a major presence. Again if true, I would expect the former Chinese to be absolutely contemptuous of their old enemy, the Japanese, terrified of overhead airplanes (which in their past life would have been Japanese and actively attempting to kill them), and affectionate to their former home, China. Reincarnation religions don't have many teaching about how cultural traits carry over between lives, other than that memories are outright erased, but Chinese culture teaches an importance to family, and stresses scholarship as a means to get ahead in the world. These habits might remain. Of course, there was an immediate criticism of the study, which found a massive methodology hole large enough to drive a truck through. It is well established that we subconsciously remember way more of what we read than we consciously remember, up to all of it, and that hypnotized people are ridiculously suggestible. A person who had read a history book that year would have access to very detailed accounts of all the aspects given in the report. Also, subjects often described dates in their supposed past lives as "Such-and-such BC," a nomenclature not used until some 400-500 years after the fact. During the BC/AD switch-over, the most common calendar was the AUC, or "After the founding of the city." The city being Rome, the most famous city at the time. It is pretty clear that in their altered state, the subjects made stuff up, and the stuff they made up was accurate because the subject had studied history. It was a tempting idea because the only people with knowledge of what people experience in death are dead themselves, and they are in no condition to report back to the living. It is even possible that the dead have no existence at all, and that deeply frightens people.

ParanoidFS

There is only one thing that I expect from a filesystem -- I expect it to store my files. If a hard drive is like a storage warehouse, a filesystem is like installing filing cabinets in that warehouse. While it is possible to just keep papers in a large pile on the floor, this is not recommended.
When it's totally unacceptable to lose data, the current orthodox solution is to use RAID-1, a system in which all data is copied to two hard drives. If one drive fails, it can be replaced and the data copied from the other drive. My new idea is an imprcatical way of achieving this on only one hard drive. (Because your company has a bizarre policy of not ordering new hardware and a crippling hard drive shortage.)
ParanoidFS would store data in five clusters for each item. At read time, the five clusters would be read and compared. A Quorum of three would decide if any blocks were defective. (That is, the blocks "vote" what the correct value is, and if one or two of them have a different value than the others, then they are wrong and are marked as defective.) This could even be done in the background after loading a fifth of the file from each cluster for performance. The filesystem would allow itself to only work in a read-only mode after a certain number of blocks were declared bad, and a warning message would tell you to buy a new hard drive. One you can take to the accounting department.
On the downside, you would get at best 1/5th of the capacity of the hard drive. A typical 1TB drive on the market, for instance, would only provide 200GB of paranoidFS, but it would be a totally immortal 200GB.

Hypertime and the Electric Plants

In a lot of media, there's places where time flows at a different rate than normal. The amount of time in and the amount of time out don't match. The closest real equivalent to this is special relativity time dilation, and that usually works in the opposite way. (The person accelerating experiences less time than everyone else.)
Anyway, this got me thinking about the movie "Clockstoppers" and their central mcGuffin, the "Hypertime". In the movie, the protagonist's scientist father invented a device that shifted him into a paralell time axis, ("Hypertime"), in which one could do time-like things and yet no time would have passed. After a long sequence of teenage boy antics and showing off for a girlfriend, the device is stolen by the movie's villain to set the center stage for the plot. And this gave me ideas.
I'd sleep in hypertime. I'd arrange for a hypertime room at work, and breaks there. When some problem has be absolutely screaming in irritation, I'd punch out, go to the hypertime room, take an eight hour nap under sedation, goof off for another four, and then return to work as no objective time had actually passed. I'd write this blog in hypertime and have two or three posts a day. Except, nags the nerdy part of me, some of this is just plain implausible.
No time means no outside electricity and no airflow. I'd suffocate while asleep. While there are existing solutions to this, such as chemical rebreathers (they have caustic solutions that absorb the carbon from your breath), my mind was already at work for alternatives, which could be useful in the real world.
The electric plant would, given electricity, strip carbon off of carbon dioxide, thus keeping air breathable in sealed environments. And provide a large source of carbon powder, which can later be sold as fuel, recovering some of the cost of the electricity. Extra bonus in solar-heavy rural areas like eastern California and Arizona, where you could have entire ranches of solar panels plus electric plants, sucking the carbon out of the air and gathering it for sale. Both to the coal plant to burn as fuel and to the pencil factory to stuff into pencils.
Portable power systems are a little more practical. Car battery, basically, that would be charged in a time environment.

Engineering Apotheosis

Image by Ralph Buckley via Flickr

There are three inventions that might not even be possible, but given them in conjunction, would grant engineers absolute omnipotence. Given all three of these things, it's only a matter of time before I'm creating entire universes.
First, a zero point energy generator. This might not even be possible. Energy is like the money of physics, and there have been a few clues that it might be possible to have negative energy as well as the positive kind that we're familiar with. If so, then from a "zero point" of no energy, you could draw off and separate arbitrary amounts of negative and positive energy, which would have to be shuttled off in opposite directions, as they would nullify each other on contact. However, negative energy hasn't been shown to really exist, and might make about as much sense as making money by sending out checks for negative amounts of money and somehow collecting when the checks are cashed in.
The first thing I'd do with zero point energy would be the mundane energy use, running the air conditioning, refrigerator, and lights with the energy, and do experiments with the negative energy. Could I run my computer on anti-electricity, and if so, would it absorb heat instead of producing it?
The next thing would be a matter condenser, that would change energy into hydrogen. Since E=MC^2, this would ensure an unlimited supply of materials. Of course, this would not be worthwhile without the unlimited energy from the zero point system.
The third thing would be some sort of teleportation system to make arbitrary manufacturing. It would have to teleport together raw materials to make things, such as combining a few grams of carbon from charcoal, hydrogen and oxygen from water, and nitrogen from air to form a hot dog. It would also need to be able to scan new patterns and store them in a computer. This also might not be possible due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in which knowing the exact position of an atom requires unpredictably altering its velocity and vice versa.
My power with these things would grow exponentially. First I'd use the teleporter/replicator to scan the three inventions and be able to arbitrarily produce more. Then I'd start scanning useful tools, which I now have in arbitrary amounts. Then, having proven its safety, I'll start handing them out because other people deserve this too. And next, I'd start designing entire star systems, which I teleport into existence. If I want to visit them, a matter-condenser rocket will take me there, accelerating to preposterous speeds with a zero-point-energy plus matter condenser, producing a stream of supercompressed hydrogen gas.
I'd send probes to go deep into the void, make a ring of trillions of matter condensers that was several AU in diameter, and spray hydrogen into the center to create stars. When the star grows enough, the welding on the ring fails and the matter condensers go flying outward into the universe. I'd recharge the sun by swapping out large amounts of it for a fresh cube of hydrogen. The heat death of the universe would never occur, because we would continuously rebuild it from scratch.

Human powered copter

Imagine a device with a little seat, a large propeller, and huge rotors. A small counterotor in the back retains the balance. Sitting in the seat and violently pedaling, the user could lift himself aloft.
...eeeexcept that the rotors would have to be about 30 feet across, and one would have to pedal really really hard. It'd have to be made of the lightest carbon fiber, and even then it probably wouldn't work.

Impractically Terraforming Venus

I think this plan is impractical, but the coolest possible way I could terraform Venus. As I mentioned before, Carl Sagan had a plan to have a city encased in a plexiglass bubble, filled with Earthlike air. Placed in Venus's atmosphere, this floats like a balloon, about six miles over Venus's inhospitable surface, where the temperature and pressure are Earthlike.
We deploy millions of these in a Dyson-like swarm. (Dyson's sphere, as described by Dr. Dyson, is not a solid object, but a swarm of satellites in clever orbits that never quite collide, and prove dense enough to capture 99% of a star's output.) The swarm orbits around Venus, and when they're close enough to each other, we connect them with steel rods, and then form "bowls" with metal plates in the area between the rods and the bubble cities. Venus now has a second "surface". Below, the supercritical carbon dioxide cools in the darkness, while above, a large planet with lots of room. We fill one bowl with imported soil, and grow plants in it. Preferably crop-plants. Any waste shucked off by the farming is put into the other bowls to compost. When the composting is done, they are super-fertile farming areas. The process accelerates until the entire surface is full of greenery. At that point, the plexiglass can be removed from the bubble cities, as human beings could now breathe this planet's air.
Down below, the carbon dioxide cools in the darkness until it is a liquid. It probably won't reach solid temperatures at this pressure. I can imagine the farmers above siphoning small amounts off on occasion. As this gets used up, the rocks below can become a second resource. Or, thirdly, the gap can be used for waste disposal, because no human being's ever going down there.
Now at the beginning, I said this was impractical. Even one sagan-bubble city would be a massively expensive trillion dollar undertaking, with some very difficult engineering in the process. This is talking about making millions, possibly even billions, of them. And as for the connecting stage, I'm not sure earth even has that much steel.

Most effective battery

I'm probably mistaken, but a lithium-gold battery would be the most effective.
I get this idea from the reactivity series, in which Lithium is the most reactive, and gold the least. A lithium-gold battery, then, would have the most energy possible. The series also implies the possibility of electroplating, with low reaction things being easiest to electroplate, with gold plating the easiest and lithium plating being impossible.
On the impractical side of this, gold is a rare material enjoying great demand for its non-corrosive nature, electrical conductivity, and good looks for jewlry. Gold is expensive, making such a battery impractical.
Ah well, it was probably a stupid idea to begin with.

ComputerWorld

In the future, when we humans as a species have some project so massive that all the world's supercomputers aren't enough, I have an idea for a huge omni-computer.
We build a planet, of which one side is purely solar cells, and the other is all a massive supercomputer-complex, with a radio-array to send and receive instructions. The interior could be storage batteries, or maybe even is hollow. Due to the massive size of this, it would have to be constructed in space. We then move it to a very close orbit around the sun, where it becomes tidally locked with the solar-cell side always facing the sun, and the computer array always facing away. The solar cell side heats to over 500C, and provides Exawatts of power. The computer side is very cold when the machine is off, -300C. When the computer turns on, that will change.
This project would easily cost a quadrillion dollars, but it would solve every computation problem known to humankind in 30 minutes. Only a more complex problem would justify the massive expense.

Autotranslator

Japanese blogger Chikirin writes that he would like to see automatic translations of everything on the internet to allow multinational communication, in an article that he kindly translated into English. He believes that this would facilitate world understanding and peace.
I'm more skeptical. I question the logistics of it. Sure, there's babelfish and google translator, but they're often tripped up by slang, idioms, and puns. Running this very page through services like that shows that they trip up on words like "Just" and "Kinda" (slang misspelling for "kind of", meaning "slightly.") Also, they can't do anything for graphics, because computers generally have comparatively poor visual recognition. (OCR can often fail because the page was tilted a mere 2 degrees.) You'd be shocked at how many pages use "navigation buttons" that consist of an image of a word, because the page designer liked it that way.
Secondly because communication doesn't necessarily make peace. How much worse would trolling become when nationalism is added to the mix? I still have memories of when the Beijing Olympics inspired nationalistic Chinese young people to go post puff-pieces about their favorite country and then recoil in horror when these got less than glowing reviews. (or even got outright trolled instead.) How many discussions would bog down to "China sucks" "No, japan sucks" "No, USA sucks" "No, Poland sucks" and so on until the heat death of the universe?
thirdly, Chikirin says that "only the important information is translated, what about the trivial?" The trivial information is typically not translated exactly because it is trivial. Good translation takes effort, and it's not really worth anyone's time to translate quite a bit of the internet. Human time is limited, and machine translations are at best stilted, and like I pointed out above, often just plain wrong.
Worse if you want to translate all the video, too, because Speech recognition has a hidden problem: The computer's never quite sure of what it is that you're saying, but is making the best probable guesses. Thus compounding any possible misunderstandings.

Automatic Window Washer

Downtown in many cities consists of buildings with innumerate glass windows, all of which slowly collect dust and must be regularly cleaned. Generally, this is done by a suspended crew, which is attached to the roof via a long rope. Various companies to do this exist in various cities. They charge a fee for this, a fee that I do not know.
If one wanted to not pay this fee, I can design a building which would wash its own windows, automatically. Each window will contain, in its sill, a mechanical squeegee, and a pipe to a supply of soapy water. Periodically, the soapy water would run over the squeegee, and the squeegee would slide to the bottom of the window with an elaborate system of gears in the cracked. It would then be worked up, and rinsed. The squeegee would be repositioned within the sill to have the rubber side face the window, and a jet of fresh water would run behind it. The rubber end would be brought down to the bottom of the window, and then back to the top. The window is now clean.
Alternatively, the soap and water solution can be replaced with ammonia, which does an excellent job at cleaning windows.
I predict few buildings will incorporate this system, which is a tad impractical.

Terraforming: Earth II

Okay, I'm back. That was a nightmare of an assignment, now I hope I can sleep enough such that I don't go insane and/or die.

So, in the early days of this blog, I showed you plans to terraform Venus and Mars, both plans being thousand-year, trillion dollar, logistical nightmares that would provide multi-trillion dollar benefits. And of course, that won't get financing because no one organization is sure that it will live that long. (I can describe the UK as being that old, if I really stretch the definition of what "the UK" is.)
But let's say you handed me all the money on the earth, and demanded that I produce a terraformed planet in 100 years. This much, I think I can handle. With the insanest plan, ever.
Using some very large mass driver (to be invented by someone at NASA, someone more insane than me), we haul Venus from its current orbit, and into the L4 Lagrange point. If this causes too much gravitational disturbance, we can replace it with its weight in similarly mass-driven rocks from deeper in the solar system. The Kupiter belt if need be.
Now we go to Mars, and ram its two moons into its surface. Then we mass-drive it over to L4. That's right, we ram them together. Preferably at an angle other than 90 degrees, because we need to spin Venus up.
The two will violently collide, providing quite the light show here on earth, slagging both of their materials molten. Part of the two will spin off into a small moon, and the other one will spin quite fast, having a ten hour day. Toss a few ice meteors at this every year, both to provide oceans and to keep the cooling time down to a mere 100 years.
At this point, the planet is like early Earth, but don't move there yet. No oxygen. You'd die. But when liquid water is apparent on the surface, it's time to bring over many plants. Any humans doing this would have to wear diving suits, because the pressure would be great, but the air would choke you dead. When the seas are full of seaweed and the ground is full of trees, then we watch. Within 50 years, it should be human-breathable.
The good news is that the planet would now support human life, but the bad news is that this would be a baby planet, with no fossil fuels. If you want coal or oil, you'll have to bring it over from Earth, at great expense. A better idea would be to fill it with wildlife and hippies. Zoo-planet, maaaaan. Also, Theodore Kazinski. He'd love the wilderness, and maybe he could manage to not get eaten.
If this plan proves wonderful, we can repeat it with Jupiter's moons, Saturn's moons, Uranus's moons, and some Kupiter belt objects, all tossed into L5 and exploded together.

Weirder Pipelines

I feel weird that I pay so much for liquids. Food sauces, vinegar, gasoline, bleach, Cleaning fluids. And the biggest business I can name immediately is cola. Bottles and cans, by the trillions, of sweetened and carbonated and flavored water. (Okay, gasoline doesn't come in a container, but it's shipped by truck to a tank at the gas station, which is a weird way to do it.)
When I use up the liquid, I still have the container sitting around. Typically, I end up throwing it away. Sometimes I wash it out and reuse it, but usually I don't bother. That's a waste.
I suppose that instead I could have pipelines into my house. Turn on the vinegar tap for the salad, turn it off when I have enough. Steak sauce from the tap for the steak. I have a guest, and he wants a coke? Fresh from the pipeline, fizzed at serving time. At laundry time, I squirt a bit of beach and detergent from the respective lines. At the end of the month, I get bills from the pipeline, which I promptly pay lest I lose service. (God forbid I have to do without vinaigrette!)
Nah, that's too insane. Each house would have hundreds of pipelines going to it and digging would be impossible. Not to mention all the kinds of hell that would break lose if one of the pipes clogged or ruptured.

Orbital Habitat

Long ago, the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange found that for any three-body orbit (that is, three large objects, a la a solar system), There are five points where you could introduce a new object and its orbit would remain stable. The next paragraph will review this idea -- feel free to skip it if you are a mathematician, physicist, or computer scientist.
The points are numbered, L1 through L5. There are two existing bodies, one larger and one smaller. For the purpose of this exercise, we will call the larger body "the sun" and the smaller one "the earth," although this could easily be adapted to any solar system. L1 is directly between "the earth" at a short distance past where the moon orbits. A solar probe is in fact maintained at this position, because it's really useful for studying the sun. (It stays with the earth's orbit, has a direct, unobstructed view of the sun, and so on.) L2 is on the other, night side of the earth, and would be a great place for a deep-space telescope. It would move with the earth, and remain forever in the earth's shadow, seeing deep into the darkness for a great resolution. (Apparently, someone else beat me to that idea, because two probes are already there, and three more are planned.) L3, L4, and L5 are the most interesting ones for this. L3 is on the opposite side of the sun from the earth, in the earth's orbit. L4 is 60 degrees "ahead" of the earth, L5 is 60 degrees "behind." The Lagrangian points are maintained by gravitational balance, and will stay in relative position until pushed out by some other force. Math, it works.
I think we should build habitats in L3, L4 and L5. They could have polluting factories, dangerous crops, or just people who we don't want anywhere near the earth. (Like say, the chronically annoying.) The platforms wouldn't touch Earth, would have an excellent supply of solar energy to power industrial or agricultural activity, and would survive events that would destroy the human ecosystem. (Oops, we nuked ourselves out of existence? L4 can reseed....)
This would be insanely expensive. Cheaper than terraforming mars or venus, but still in the multiple billions, and up to trillions, especially if we make it a large, human habitable habitat, and not just a simple lightweight probe.

Brains and Time

I've been thinking about employment, and much of what we pay people to do is actually a waste of money. At the wages one pays, say, an engineer, it's a waste of money for them to empty their own garbage can. Any second that you're paying them and they're not designing some machine to save you money is wasted money. Same deal for chemists, it's a waste of money to pay them to wash their own glassware. In fact, maybe chemists should just watch recordings of experiments done by other, cheaper, people, or machines. Let's call this "the butler principle."
Yes, I can see it now. Chemistry experiments are done by machines, that record the entire process, and chemists just watch the video and take notes. The machines also rise the beakers clean down to the last molecule.
Nah, that's too crazy.

Under the sea

Darling it's better, down where it's wetter take it from me....

What's that, Mr. Iger? Stop singing from your company's musicals? Fine.

361 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface are covered in salty water. This represents 71% of the total area. They are contiguous with each other, and the only area on earth not claimed by any nation yet. (Well...the area near some countries is claimed, but if you want unclaimed area, you'll need to go deep into the ocean.)

While aspiring libertarians talk about utilizing this through a fleet of little boats, a more permanent, and less nauseating, form of living could be established through enormous domes built on the seafloor and then pressurized with air. An airlock would allow access through submarine, and if the roof of this dome were made of transparent materials, it would be absolutely spectacular. Some farming, or water electrolysis, would be necessary to keep up the supply of breathable oxygen. Farming is probably the best strategy, as it neutralizes waste, produces oxygen, and produces food, thus making the habitat self-sustainable.

Of course, if the habitat is more than 200 meters deep, likely considering where it would have to be to be independent of other countries, it will also need independent lighting, electric power sources, and a whole mess more of complications.

Now if you need me, I'll be listening to Bach's Wachet Auf...

Build it to the sky

Why don't we have cities with a massive subway system, apartment complexes a thousand stories high, and office complexes the same? So many people could live there...

Well, in the past, the issue has been transportation. Everyone needs food, water, and consumer goods to take in, but waste and heat must be removed. The average municipal water-grid only pumps the water to enough pressure to lift it up four floors. All of these mega-apartment buildings would need massive pump-rooms so that people higher up could still drink a glass of water and flush the toilet.

Beyond that, there are emergency evacuation issues. Should the building catch fire, how can everyone run to safety? Ladder over to the next building from the roof? Metal fire-escape stairs? Parachutes? A hang-gliding escape, while hilarious, might not work safely.

The last issue is that people probably won't like it. Experiments with rats showed that if you crowd them together too much, all the rats go insane. They attack each other. Their sexuality malfunctions. Their social cohesion completely goes out the window. I have no reason to believe human people would also have a limit, beyond which they suffer from want of privacy, and a crowded, crammed feeling.

If we keep expanding, we may have to take up such a mega-project. They're not making any more land, and no one is bothering with terraforming, space stations, or undersea biomes (hey, now there's an idea). If we don't keep expanding, though, the economy collapses, business suffers, and nations bemoan the dearth of citizens, as they do in many countries in Europe and Japan.

Ininite Monkey Source

The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that given an endless source of random letters (such as, say, a monkey tirelessly hitting keys on a typewriter), eventually all kinds of useful things will be found within the garbage, purely by chance. All of human literature, surprising solutions to world problems, interesting medical, philosophical, and mathematical ideas are all possible, just absurdly unlikely. This of course can be compensated with more data sources (more monkey and more typewriters) and more time.
Mathematicians determined that this would work because while the chance of producing anything useful out of a random pile of letters is minuscule, it is not nonexistent. One gets a barn-megaparsec effect, which I'm naming after the totally insane unit of measurement. A barn is a ridiculously tiny measurement of area, used to measure the area of atomic collisions, and a megaparsec is an absurdly long measure of linear distance, thousands of light-years long. Multiplied together to form a measurement of volume, you get 2/3rds of a teaspoon. Practical for human use, but measured in the most ludicrous form possible. Same here, a tiny thing is multiplied by a huge thing to produce a moderate result.
The network working group even put out an April-Fools document describing how to do this on a computer: the infinite monkey protocol suite. Well, I can't put together an archiver, a literacy-recognizer, or an idea critic, but I can get you the monkey. In the C language, as I like it. Computer science readers, feel free to translate it into your own language.

#define CONTROLCHAR 32
#define ASCIIMAX 255 - CONTROLCHAR
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
char monkeytype()
{
  char output;  // The output character chosen by the monkey
  srand(time(0)); // Randomize timer
  srand(rand());  // Rerandomize.  Definitely a random character now.
  ouput=CONTROLCHAR + rand() % ASCIIMAX; // Produce an output character.
  while(output > 126)  // If it's "Delete this letter" or an other unprintable....
  {
    ouput=CONTROLCHAR + rand() % ASCIIMAX;  // Reroll.   Unprintable is not allowed.
  }
  return output; // When satisfied, return the letter to the main program.
}
int main()
{
  char letter; // Expect a "letter."
  while(input!=ctrl+c) // Okay, I forget how to really say "Until the user hits ctrl+c."
  {
  letter=monkeytype(); // Type a "letter."
  printf(letter); // Print it out.
  }  // Repeat.
return 0; // All went well?  Good.
}

Presumably the protocol maintainer would modify the main block to instead first connect to the storage-handler, then monkeytype at it, listening for signals asking it to stop.