God Questions
Recently, as I was changing a diaper, I thought about landfills. Where I am located, what I was changing would go to a landfill and I was thinking about how much space this would take up and what to do with it.
I was wishing something like plasma gasification was viable and didn’t end up being glorified incineration. What about grinding down landfills so that the remainder could be used for building material? Well, you’d need to expend lots of energy and even if that energy was green-sourced, it would be diverting a reduction of CO2 from other areas. But, it could potentially reduce CO2 being used to create new materials. But but… it could also lead to accelerated decomposition, releasing methane. Ugh. It seems like a no win.
Normally, this type of thought would just linger and then disappear, but now I have a tool to engage. ChatGPT will try to figure out different models for a business of grinding garbage.
This further reminded me of a Robot Chicken episode from many years ago. In the episode, a character goes to heaven and is offered a book that can answer any questions about his life. He ends up asking some silly questions that get him sent to hell, where he jokes about the answers he received from the book of his life.
Now, I don’t know how the writers of the episode came up with their estimates, but running the same question through ChatGPT came up with what seems like a more accurate answer and with the work being shown, I’m more confident in what it determined. I won’t go over the question here but the result of the book of his life was off by almost a factor of a 100.
It’s great that there is now a tool to satisfy curios questions that require some calculation.
