Google's decision to sponsor construction of nuclear power plants is interesting for several reasons. One of course is the Three Mile Island/Chernobyl anti-environment concern; in times of war or just terrorism via drones and hypersonic vectors nuclear atomization and dispersion could be hazardous to the health of Californians and others downwind like Nevada. Google could obviously choose to locate nuclear plants across the border in Mexico and around the nation near its data centers creating more work for climatologists predicting fallout patterns and shadows for possible disasters.
The choice for Google to go nuclear to provide abundant power for AI like Gemini with the Silkwood factor forgotten in history exemplifies the human acceleration toward building up semi-intelligence with the simultaneous externality of increased entropy.
In less than one generation the country has gone from vacuum tubes and transistors with mainframe computers and no pcs or smartphones-instead rotary dial phones on party lines were the norm, to vast networks of sprawling AI data centers demanding power for everyone's AI assistant on their smartphone and devices, laptops etc. The attraction for more ease and convenience outweighs- easily, the social good sense to configure a real material environment where the biosphere is not itself made into an externality of 'progress' and reciprocally forced into decline.
Some evolutionary biologists have speculated that the most successful life on other are prokaryotes because they have been around for billions of years and may outlast the ark of creative intelligence that appeared briefly in the brief time of the complex organism of homo sapiens before they destroyed themselves. It is good to know that at least the meek or rather the simple will inherit the Earth if humanity destroys itself for lack of good sense in quest of excess profit.
This phenomenon of the accretion of technology without a corresponding increase in environmental conservatism brings me to consider the complex of compresent developments of war saturating the planet following the catalyzing effect of the Ukraine war field test and development laboratory.
The Russians have developed the marvelous Oreshnik hypersoninc, marved missile that is truck launched, flies to space and releases several multiple reentry warhead vehicles that travel down to Earth targets at mach 11 twisting and spiraling on their way to evade Patriot missiles. Concurrently the U.S. navy has hypersonic whaling guns that shoot missiles from the bow at distant military targets. On a single day Ukraine may send 500 drones to attack Moscow while Russia retaliates with Islander hypersonic missiles that are short range and low trajectory flying under radar. The world is being saturated by smart bombs that fly, crawl and swim under the ocean surface. I can hardly wait until the year 2040 to see how that works out.
