Almonds Can't Do Math

A single almond requires an average of 12 liters (3.2 gallons) of water to grow.
Almond milk: It takes about 1,600 gallons of water to produce one liter of almond milk. The ratio of almonds to water in almond milk is usually 1:3 or 1:4.

According to a report, Chat GPT consumes approximately 500 ml of fresh, clean water every twenty to fifty questions. Although it may not appear to be a large volume of water each time, the fact that Chat GPT has over 100 million users monthly and is consistently responding to queries and producing answers accumulates quickly. It is estimated that during its training, Chat GPT consumed about 700,000 liters of water, which is equivalent to the amount of water used by an average American household in about 20 years

To keep the numbers visibly fair, ChatGPT training according to above took ~185,000 gallons of water.

That is equal to 115 liters of almond milk. There is more almond milk at my local Whole Foods rn than it took to train ChatGPT.

As for usage (again, using the source above), it takes roughly between 150 and 380 messages to reach a gallon at 500ml for 20-50 messages, which means you need to send between 480 and ~1210 messages (let's call it 845 messages for convenience) to equal the water consumption of one almond.

In sustainability, it is important not to look at numbers just quantitatively, but also to consider them qualitatively. We need to consider what are appropriate replacements for the things that we are trying to replace. For example, does almond milk have any particular replacements that serve the same purpose of a non-dairy milk substitute?

As a user of these models, particularly ChatGPT, we need to recognize that they are doing math and thinking. We are outsourcing our thinking to these models, and these models are creating new things collaboratively with their users that can't be replaced currently.

I pray that one day we can look forward to a future of nuclear energy, and more efficient algorithms, and where public opinion doesn't run away with a few headlines without comparing problems to each other in a vacuum from a level headed perspective.

Almonds can't do math, after all.

It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million). By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred. Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel. Splitting atoms to create heat, rather than splitting chemical bonds through fire, requires tiny amounts of fuel. A single Coke can of uranium can provide enough energy for an entire high-energy life. As a result, when the worst occurs with nuclear—and the fuel melts—the amount of particulate matter that escapes from the plant is insignificant in comparison to the particulate matter from fossil- and biomass-burning homes, cars, and power plants, which killed eight million people in 2016. Nuclear is thus the safest way to make reliable electricity. In fact, nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year. For that reason, replacing nuclear energy with fossil fuels costs lives. A study published in late 2019 found that Germany’s nuclear phase-out is costing its citizens $12 billion per year, with more than 70 percent of the cost resulting from 1,100 excess deaths from “local air pollution emitted by the coal-fired power plants operating in place of the shutdown nuclear plants.”

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Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat. Thus, only nuclear can affordably create the hydrogen gas and electricity that will provide services such as heating, cooking, and transportation, which are currently provided by fossil fuels. And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment. And yet the people who say they care and worry the most about climate change tell us we don’t need nuclear.

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Solar panels can become more efficient and wind turbines can become larger, but solar and wind have hard physical limits. The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years. The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.

Apocolypse Never by Michael Schellenberger