Top of our development
The development of civilization is a collective way to expand our knowledge, everything else is secondary: energy, industry, space - all these are the fruits of our desire for knowledge. It is necessary to understand the chain of causal relationships, more information available -> more knowledge -> more efficient devices -> we can receive more energy. It is worth remembering that the first steam engines — the most complex mechanisms of the 18th century — worked like pumps in coal mines. Therefore, first new knowledge and new mechanisms, and only then new energy in the required amount. So let's discard various prejudices and let's face it: the peak of the development of our civilization today is the iPhone. So let him and we are responsible for new sources of energy.
Siri, where is the nearest gas station?
As I wrote earlier, the forerunner of the first industrial revolution was the Guttenberg printing press. This invention allowed to put the process of accumulation and distribution of knowledge on an exponential path of development . The third industrial revolution, on the threshold of which we are all now marking time, is due to the invention and development of information technology. A computer is both a source of accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and one of the most complex mechanisms that we are capable of doing now. By analogy with historical events, this is our printing press and our steam engine.
If the first industrialization was the process of automating large-scale mechanical work in various industries, then the information revolution made it possible to automate the accumulation and production of new knowledge . For those who are already two paragraphs scornfully grinning about lovers of iPhones, and our story goes. The influence of computer on our existence is much more fundamental than it may seem from everyday experience.
')
For a moment, move away from the Gadi iPhones and deal with one of the most brutal male professions, namely geological exploration.
Geologists in search of oil. With the romance of guitars and tents, something went wrong.
Oil production, as well as victory in a military battle, is impossible without intelligence. Even before the start of drilling a well, you should at least roughly represent what awaits you underground, there must be some kind of map. Without a card, oil production turns into an attempt to guess the taste of watermelon by the rind pattern. The main method of exploration is a seismic study of the subsoil. How does this happen?
They take a powerful source of vibration so that the waves generated by them have enough energy to penetrate to the required depth. This is either a special vibrator on the chassis of the truck, or a dimple / well with an explosive embedded there. Elastic waves propagate into the depths of terrestrial rocks and are partially refracted and reflected from different layers back to the surface, where they are received by seismic receivers. The data is recorded by a special recorder and, together with the data on the elastic properties of rocks, this makes it possible to construct a map of a geological section with a depth of up to ten kilometers. Now you can understand where the oil trap.
Using the method you see a two-dimensional section of the surface, instead of a three-dimensional picture. In the “top” view, this looks like a line, and the section plane is visible when viewed from the side. Type of such:
The result is a 2D seismic survey. Oil and gas traps are marked in green.
Understanding reality based on this snapshot is like trying to identify what is drawn on the right picture, revealing only individual lines on the left:
This is possible if you approximately know what you are looking for - for example, that this is a picture of a certain person, or you have determined at least approximately where the oil is and you only need to clarify your data. But with the exhaustion of oil fields close to the surface with simple geological conditions, the method becomes less and less effective and it is necessary to cover a larger area with more and more detail. And the cost of such a study grows in proportion to the number of observations that you record, and the number of observations grows in a square with increasing research area.
After some border, manual data processing becomes too expensive and this limits the possibilities of oil extraction, as well as the flooding of British coal mines and the capacity of manual / horse pumping limited coal production. In both cases, the help of special machines was needed. For the British mines needed a steam pump that automates the pumping of water, and for the extraction of oil - a computer that records and calculates for you the increasing volumes of seismic data.
History of seismic revolves around the company GSI, which was its first successfully applied in 1924, and information technology. By 1950, instead of paper carriers began to use magnetic tape and analog electronics based on transistors. A pioneer in this innovation was the GSI division with the then unknown name “Texas Instruments” (the legendary inventor of integrated circuits), and Texas Instruments bought the license to manufacture transistors to serve the needs of seismic exploration. In the 1960s, there was a transition from analog systems to the first commercial digital computers, which made it possible to increase data processing speed and detail. But still the main limitation of the method remained: the two-dimensionality of the result.
The first experiment on the production of three-dimensional seismic maps was carried out in 1972 by the forces of the above-mentioned GSI and six large oil companies. Data collection (500,000 separate records) took a month, computer processing for two whole years . For the oil industry, the project was comparable in complexity to the launch of the first satellite for astronautics and the result turned out to be beyond praise: we managed to find several new fields on the newly exhausted oil pipeline in the state of New Mexico.
The method became widespread only in the early 1980s of the last century and only with the development of a new generation of supercomputers. To understand the reasons, it suffices to look at the cost of one gigaflops in fixed dollars - it was only in the 1980s that the cost of processing such volumes of data for normal periods became available to individual large companies.
Deciphering 3D seismography data required enormous computing resources and 3D seismic surveying companies were processing the data on powerful supercomputers of the time. Here, for example, the 1996 press release on the conclusion of a contract between the oil company and the Minnesota Supercomputer Center Inc (MSCI) university computer center, where data processing was carried out on CM-5 supercomputers from Cinking Thinking Machines and T3D. Computing power was 52.6 and 76 gigaflops, that is, almost without lagging behind the world leader (150 GFlops), and CM-5 even managed to visit this leader. Just for fun, parallel to the writing of this text, I launched a benchmark on my home 4-core core-i5 and got a value of 89.25 gigaflops.
The logic of causal relationships here is as simple as the famous “money in the morning, chairs in the evening”. First supercomputers, then productive intelligence, then oil. Nowadays, we are no longer so limited by computational capabilities and we can process orders of magnitude more data than we could even in the late 1990s. From this it follows that the area of ​​seismic surveys is already essentially not limited to this aspect. But realists are already in a hurry to remind you that we live in a physical world where you cannot just take and wrap 10,000 square kilometers of wires and microphones. That the truck with the wires in the picture below in this case should be replaced by a mining truck, and maybe the whole train. And the number of handlers will be comparable with the army of the DPRK. Yes, you are right, right.
Ax, if we could get rid of the wires, if we had a device with sensors, a microphone, a GPS, a radio transmitter, a processor, which allows us to control all this good in real time and, of course, a sufficiently powerful battery for uninterrupted operation. Who said iphone?
Unfortunately, the idea has already been implemented by an American company in 2012:
Metrosexuals with iPhones in a trendy electric car (left) against brutal men with a trailer wires (right)
Orthodox Gazpromneft, which tried this technology first in mountainous and dangerous Kurdistan and now uses it in frozen forests of western Siberia, is not far behind :
What is the conclusion? The main thing is not what we have from nature and where we live, the main thing is the sum of our knowledge. For example, oil, do not blame the nature that it gave us a little oil - you just need to be able to find and produce it. As long as we continue to increase the amount of knowledge as a species, our capabilities will grow, because the universe is full of energy and you just need to know how to take it. Now the most important tool of knowledge for us is the computer, without which modern existence is simply impossible. Want to know the potential of civilization? Find out how many supercomputers there are.
Siri, where is the nearest gas station?
As I wrote earlier, the forerunner of the first industrial revolution was the Guttenberg printing press. This invention allowed to put the process of accumulation and distribution of knowledge on an exponential path of development . The third industrial revolution, on the threshold of which we are all now marking time, is due to the invention and development of information technology. A computer is both a source of accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and one of the most complex mechanisms that we are capable of doing now. By analogy with historical events, this is our printing press and our steam engine.
If the first industrialization was the process of automating large-scale mechanical work in various industries, then the information revolution made it possible to automate the accumulation and production of new knowledge . For those who are already two paragraphs scornfully grinning about lovers of iPhones, and our story goes. The influence of computer on our existence is much more fundamental than it may seem from everyday experience.
')
For a moment, move away from the Gadi iPhones and deal with one of the most brutal male professions, namely geological exploration.
Geologists in search of oil. With the romance of guitars and tents, something went wrong.
Oil production, as well as victory in a military battle, is impossible without intelligence. Even before the start of drilling a well, you should at least roughly represent what awaits you underground, there must be some kind of map. Without a card, oil production turns into an attempt to guess the taste of watermelon by the rind pattern. The main method of exploration is a seismic study of the subsoil. How does this happen?
They take a powerful source of vibration so that the waves generated by them have enough energy to penetrate to the required depth. This is either a special vibrator on the chassis of the truck, or a dimple / well with an explosive embedded there. Elastic waves propagate into the depths of terrestrial rocks and are partially refracted and reflected from different layers back to the surface, where they are received by seismic receivers. The data is recorded by a special recorder and, together with the data on the elastic properties of rocks, this makes it possible to construct a map of a geological section with a depth of up to ten kilometers. Now you can understand where the oil trap.
Using the method you see a two-dimensional section of the surface, instead of a three-dimensional picture. In the “top” view, this looks like a line, and the section plane is visible when viewed from the side. Type of such:
The result is a 2D seismic survey. Oil and gas traps are marked in green.
Understanding reality based on this snapshot is like trying to identify what is drawn on the right picture, revealing only individual lines on the left:
This is possible if you approximately know what you are looking for - for example, that this is a picture of a certain person, or you have determined at least approximately where the oil is and you only need to clarify your data. But with the exhaustion of oil fields close to the surface with simple geological conditions, the method becomes less and less effective and it is necessary to cover a larger area with more and more detail. And the cost of such a study grows in proportion to the number of observations that you record, and the number of observations grows in a square with increasing research area.
After some border, manual data processing becomes too expensive and this limits the possibilities of oil extraction, as well as the flooding of British coal mines and the capacity of manual / horse pumping limited coal production. In both cases, the help of special machines was needed. For the British mines needed a steam pump that automates the pumping of water, and for the extraction of oil - a computer that records and calculates for you the increasing volumes of seismic data.
Intelligence without iT - wasted money
History of seismic revolves around the company GSI, which was its first successfully applied in 1924, and information technology. By 1950, instead of paper carriers began to use magnetic tape and analog electronics based on transistors. A pioneer in this innovation was the GSI division with the then unknown name “Texas Instruments” (the legendary inventor of integrated circuits), and Texas Instruments bought the license to manufacture transistors to serve the needs of seismic exploration. In the 1960s, there was a transition from analog systems to the first commercial digital computers, which made it possible to increase data processing speed and detail. But still the main limitation of the method remained: the two-dimensionality of the result.
The first experiment on the production of three-dimensional seismic maps was carried out in 1972 by the forces of the above-mentioned GSI and six large oil companies. Data collection (500,000 separate records) took a month, computer processing for two whole years . For the oil industry, the project was comparable in complexity to the launch of the first satellite for astronautics and the result turned out to be beyond praise: we managed to find several new fields on the newly exhausted oil pipeline in the state of New Mexico.
The method became widespread only in the early 1980s of the last century and only with the development of a new generation of supercomputers. To understand the reasons, it suffices to look at the cost of one gigaflops in fixed dollars - it was only in the 1980s that the cost of processing such volumes of data for normal periods became available to individual large companies.
Deciphering 3D seismography data required enormous computing resources and 3D seismic surveying companies were processing the data on powerful supercomputers of the time. Here, for example, the 1996 press release on the conclusion of a contract between the oil company and the Minnesota Supercomputer Center Inc (MSCI) university computer center, where data processing was carried out on CM-5 supercomputers from Cinking Thinking Machines and T3D. Computing power was 52.6 and 76 gigaflops, that is, almost without lagging behind the world leader (150 GFlops), and CM-5 even managed to visit this leader. Just for fun, parallel to the writing of this text, I launched a benchmark on my home 4-core core-i5 and got a value of 89.25 gigaflops.
Oil and gas iPhone
The logic of causal relationships here is as simple as the famous “money in the morning, chairs in the evening”. First supercomputers, then productive intelligence, then oil. Nowadays, we are no longer so limited by computational capabilities and we can process orders of magnitude more data than we could even in the late 1990s. From this it follows that the area of ​​seismic surveys is already essentially not limited to this aspect. But realists are already in a hurry to remind you that we live in a physical world where you cannot just take and wrap 10,000 square kilometers of wires and microphones. That the truck with the wires in the picture below in this case should be replaced by a mining truck, and maybe the whole train. And the number of handlers will be comparable with the army of the DPRK. Yes, you are right, right.
Ax, if we could get rid of the wires, if we had a device with sensors, a microphone, a GPS, a radio transmitter, a processor, which allows us to control all this good in real time and, of course, a sufficiently powerful battery for uninterrupted operation. Who said iphone?
Unfortunately, the idea has already been implemented by an American company in 2012:
Metrosexuals with iPhones in a trendy electric car (left) against brutal men with a trailer wires (right)
Orthodox Gazpromneft, which tried this technology first in mountainous and dangerous Kurdistan and now uses it in frozen forests of western Siberia, is not far behind :
What is the conclusion? The main thing is not what we have from nature and where we live, the main thing is the sum of our knowledge. For example, oil, do not blame the nature that it gave us a little oil - you just need to be able to find and produce it. As long as we continue to increase the amount of knowledge as a species, our capabilities will grow, because the universe is full of energy and you just need to know how to take it. Now the most important tool of knowledge for us is the computer, without which modern existence is simply impossible. Want to know the potential of civilization? Find out how many supercomputers there are.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/364953/
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