Oops. Errata. I did in fact make an error in that post on the vaporization of the rivers. I plugged in the wrong multiplier. Looks like I was off by a factor of about 6.87X in the total. So much less of the Mississippi would have been vaporized with the 500 GWe, though it would have been completely vaporized with the full primary power production. It would not have been enough to completely vaporize all of those rivers, they would have just boiled with a relatively small fraction vaporizing. I mean, it would still be enough to pretty much wipe out all the life except for extremophiles, so the point about thermal pollution being a real problem still stands, but I did make an error for which I apologize.

I don't need a better idea. They already exist. I think you've forgotten in all these posts that the whole point of this was noting that Flamanville is smaller than the average which is a little over 3 sq km per GW for nuclear power plants. Nuclear plants using ocean water can use various techniques that more or less fit into your list. For example, they can evaporate ocean water in a cooling tower, so that it gets absorbed mostly by a phase change and then goes into the atmosphere For oceanside plants though, a common method is to have a large number of cooling ponds or canals taking up a lot of ground area. Some of the heat goes into the atmosphere, some goes into the ground, etc. The point is that the water cools down first, then is returned to the ocean. Once through systems like Flamanville save on space and on cost, but they are also recognized as sources of pollution. Plenty of studies have confirmed that dumping massive amounts of hot water into the ocean is indeed harmful.

As for your other examples like into the air. That is done through two main methods. One is pure air cooling, which takes a lot of infrastructure and extra land and cost, but is really the only realistic option without a massive water source. Another uses those flowing water sources you mentioned and cooling tower where water is evaporated (pluses: doesn't heat the water source like once-through and uses less water, minus: the water is removed from the fresh water supply, which denies it to those downstream. The once-through method with flowing water sources of course adds heat pollution. To get an idea of how much, consider some of the rivers in the US by flow rate:
Mississippi (number one by flow rate): About 16.8 million liters per second. So that means that if a 1 GWe electric plant uses the whole river for cooling and the heat is distributed evenly (which does not happen, of course, they take a tiny fraction and it gets released in a hot spot), then the river is heated by about 0.179 C. Not massive, but not nothing.
Skipping the St. Lawrence because of complicated water rights issues since it is mostly Canadian.
Ohio (number three): 8 million liters per second. So a 1 GWe plant raises the whole river by 0.376 C.
Niagara (number seven): 5.8 million liters per second. So, 1 GWe plant raises the whole river by 0.517 C
Missouri (number ten): 2.44 million liters per second. S0, 1GWe plant raises the whole river by 1.23 C
Of course, that's just a 1 GWe plant. If all of the approximately 500 GWe of Electricity the US uses were generated by nuclear plants and cooled by these rivers, (assuming a 15 C starting point), the Mississippi river would be raised to 100 C and 90.5% of it would be totally vaporized to steam. Any other single US river would be totally vaporized.
If, instead of just electricity, but all approximately 3,500 GWe of US primary power the US uses were generated by nuclear plants and cooled by rivers, the top 38 rivers in the US (with the last one being the Colorado river, with about a 27th of the flow rate of the Mississippi oh, and including the full flow rate of the St. Lawrence, ignoring Canada's rights), representing probably most of the flowing water in the US (hard to find exact figures on and even the numbers I am using here probably double count a lot since some of these rivers flow into the others), would be completely vaporized. Just to note, for the above, I am taking enthalpy of vaporization into consideration.

So, the entire point is that Flamanville is not really a good example of the typical size of a nuclear plant because it gets to cheat on size by dumping heat pollution into the English channel. Plants like that get by with a grandfather exception, but new plants can't get away with that. As the analysis shows, the heat dumped by these plants is not insignificant.

You realize that's a "the solution to pollution is dilution" argument, right? The problem is not the heating of the entire Atlantic ocean. Do you now that the house I live in is built on the Earth. That's a pretty huge thermal mass. If my house catches fire, it's not going to be noticeable in how it affects the heat of planet Earth. I might have some reasons to be concerned about the local effects, however. So, if you're not sure about the analogy there, the problem is locally where the hot water, which rises, heats the top layer of water.

Also, I should note that the _electrical_ output of Flamaville is 1.3 GW, but that translates to a _thermal_ output of about 4 GW. That's enough to raise the temperature of nearly a million liters of water by 1 degree C every second. Or say an area of 1 square km and one meter deep (once again, hot water tends to rise to the top) by 3.6 degrees C every hour. It is not trivial for the area around the outlet and, combined with all of those phosphate and iron containing pollution you mentioned, certainly risks creating giant, toxic algal blooms that kill off mass numbers of local sea life. Basically, it is clear that this nuclear station only exists because it is grandfathered. It's not like the other pollution you mentioned is OK, either, but there are good reasons not to allow this sort of thing

Note: I wrote note last to basically say there isn't much point in reading the below. It's just more or less me thinking with my fingers about options for a heat differential storage systems and what heat storage medium would be best. Basically the conclusion is that, yeah, it's water. Without some extreme need to fit it into a particularly cramped space, a suitable floor to ceiling tank should fit in most spaces.

Water has excellent heat capacity both by mass and volume, but there is the narrow heat range without a special vessel, at least when storing heat, so I was thinking about a material that can hold more heat simply by changing its temperature a lot more. You can store more heat per degree Kelvin in a cubic meter of water than a cubic meter of sand, but the sand won't explode its container if you heat it up over 100 C. Of course, there the limits for increasing the temperature are going to be based on how well insulated you can make it, and also your energy budget for heat. Obviously, you want to get as much heat as you can through heat pump techniques (possibly chained) but, at a certain point of diminishing returns, the efficiency will drop to the point where you will need to switch to resistive heating (though that should not be a problem if you have surplus electricity during the day, and that is where smart grid features should come into play, so your appliances know when to draw extra power from the grid to avoid waste). Overall though, while there is the potential to store more heat in a lower volume with a material other than water if you can simply make use of higher temperatures. Storing cold with lower temperatures obviously has more limitations though. You can't cool the material more once you hit the limit of heat pumping the way you can with simple resistive heating. With water, you can also exploit the latent heat of fusion of water when it phase changes (but you do need a container that can withstand its expansion, maybe you can keep it in some sort of slush form). You could have a water tank for when you're handling cold and a tank of other material for heat, but that negates the space savings. So, it does get a bit tricky storing both heat and cold to find a better material than water.

On the other hand, perhaps you can simply store heat for both heating and for cooling. Even in hot weather, you could exploit the differential with the air outside to drive a secondary process that would also pump heat out of the interior.

I may be overthinking trying to save space though. Taking a look at just water:

Obviously, you ideally just have enough space for a big enough water tank. If we imagine a need for a max of 50K BTUs/hour, 20 hours per day that you want to run without drawing electricity from the grid, that's 1 million BTUs or a bit over a gigaJoule or, more appropriately 252,164 kiloCalories. If we are raising from 20 C to let's say right at 100 C, that's 80 kiloCalories per kg (liter) of water, so we would need about 3,160 liters (rounding up slightly) or 3.16 cubic meters. Assuming a 2 meter tall tank, that means about a 1.6 square meter floor area, so about 1.27 meters on a side. That's not too bad actually. Obviously you would want some good insulation around the tank. Plus you would need to be able to get it through doorways, so you would want either a composite tank made of a number of tall, thin tanks, which you assemble together and surround with insulation after, or possibly the tank is custom built onsite through other methods then insulated. Something like that could fit in the kind of spaces where lots of homes currently keep their hot water heaters. With enough insulation, it could even go outside.

For cooling, you could go with the same technique. If we assume the same 50K BTUs/hour, then we need the same approx 252,164 kiloCalories. Cool the water from 20 C to 0, and your 3160 liter tank stores 63,200 kiloCalories of heat differential. To go beyond that, one approach is antifreeze, but you run into the problem that the more antifreeze you add, the less heat the solution can hold per degree Kelvin. You can't get to the point where you can get the rest of the cold you need with that volume of water while it is still a liquid. If you freeze it, you get 80 kiloCalories per kg. So freezing the water gives you the rest that you need to get the 252K+ kiloCalories and then some (just that 80 matches the 252K+ Kilocalories. Obviously, the problem there is that expansion of the water in the tank. You only need to freeze 75% of the water in the tank to reach your goal though. If the tank has enough air at the top and a pressure release valve and you freeze the water in some pattern, like having a central core of ice that does not reach the sides, you can prevent the ice from causing freeze-thaw damage to the tank. Otherwise if you can keep it as some sort of slush, etc. Also, you could combine methods so the water does have antifreeze in it, but not enough to reduce the heat capacity by too much. Enough so that you can get it below freezing, but still freeze a portion of it and reach the storage goal. Also, have to consider that a core of ice is going to be buoyant. How buoyant might vary a bit with a hybrid approach with antifreeze, but it would be based on about 9% of the mass of ice. So it would be approximately 213 kilos (about 2100 Newtons of force). That could be handled with extra space at the top of the tank, but holding down 213 kilos structurally should not be much of a challenge, just a consideration.

So, it looks like, without some really major space limitation, the extra complication of not just using water would not be worth it. Also, as far as the actual heat storage amount, obviously that might vary. However, except in cases of extremely drafty, poorly insulated houses, it should be suitable for most installations.

Not sure if they bother with masks, but they definitely have agents grabbing people in the streets. I mean, they have mobile execution vans. The masked agents in the US seem to be part of a plan to normalize that sort of thing, certainly.

Strict gun control makes significant numbers of school shootings unlikely and contributes to the low officially recorded murder rate. Looking at the stats now, they report a 99.9% case closure rate for murders which is terrifying because it is virtually impossible for it to be true. Best case is that they are just official lies, but I worry that it is because the authorities have a mandate to "solve" every case no matter what. Meaning that, if there is a murder (or even something that just looks like a murder) someone is arrested, tried, and executed for it in short order regardless of whether they did it or not.

Well, yeah, except for the little fact that warm water is exactly the thing that turns all of those things you mentioned into total disasters. For example, giant, toxic algal blooms that kill everything in the water.

I have no inability whatsoever to admit that the number 19 is less than the number 283. The moronic part is where you fail to recognize that I am calling your actual claims about what the numbers really are and your interpretation of them into question, not whether one number is bigger than another.

I am obviously considering that metric. The CO2 per kWh for both nuclear and wind and solar are well within our target range. They are effectively equivalent on that metric.

I consider capacity factor in all of my calculations. I typically use 93% for that figure for nuclear (though I should note that, for France, it is only about 66.7%), 34% of nameplate for onshore wind in the US. For Solar, I often do more involved research, but for parity, I normally use 20% of nameplate. So, those are always considered in my calculations, comparisons, and analyses.

As for land usage, it's pretty clear that wind power uses less than nuclear. I get an upper size estimate of around 426 square meters for the concrete pad of a wind turbine (and this is ignoring the fact that you can actually use the land on top of the concrete pad too) and to match the 930 MW for a 1 GWe power plant (1 GW multiplied by 93% capacity factor) I get 547 5 MW nameplate wind turbines producing 1.7 MW (with 34% capacity factor), even though the pad size I mentioned would probably actually fit a larger turbine. So that would be 233,022 square meters, or about a quarter of a square kilometer for a 1 GW wind farm. A nuclear plant has the next lowest footprint. Most numbers given are about 3 square km per GW for nuclear, though someone else pointed out Flamanville with about a 1 GW to 1 square km ratio, though it manages that compactness by sitting right on the English channel and directly pulling in Channel water and then pumping hot water directly back into the channel. In any case, more than Wind. Solar does take more land, clearly. However, nuclear generally requires waterfront property which is normally premium property. Solar can operate in desert areas that people tend to think of as wastelands. Now, it is possibly to use nuclear without a massive source of cooling water, but that generally means a lot more land use and more expense.

As far as material usage goes, wind power is generally acknowledged as having the most material usage out of our candidates. Most of that is steel and concrete. Of course, nuclear plants use massive amounts of those too. As far as the concrete goes, most numbers seem to put it at about 4X the concrete use of nuclear power plants almost entirely because of the need for a massive pad to anchor the tower. The thing is, there are plenty of ways to reduce that usage, it is just that installers mostly have not bothered yet. It's like retaining walls, there's the well-engineered way where you use relatively little reinforced concrete in a braced, roughly L-shaped structure with footings designed to anchor against slippage and use the weight of the soil it is retaining to actually hold it in place (while also backfilling with gravel and a geotextile layer and providing drainage to prevent issues with hydrostatic pressure), or you can just rely on mass and make a really big wall. Updated techniques for the pads for wind turbines will reduce concrete usage 75% or more, putting wind on parity with nuclear for concrete. For steel usage, there's rebar in the concrete, and the better engineered designs I mentioned will reduce that as well, by similar proportions, then there's the steel in the tower itself, from what I can find, the required mass of steel goes down somewhat the larger the wind tower. For the larger ones, it looks like you're looking at 4-5 times the steel of a comparable nuclear plant. Of course, there is a caveat to this. The math when comparing to a nuclear plant is often done in terms of its expected lifetime vs other sources of power. The thing is, giant steel towers on massive concrete bases made with modern engineering techniques have realistic lifespans of hundreds of years if maintained. Various steel structures around the world attest to that. So that really means that wind towers have life expectancy potentially 4-5 times longer than a nuclear plant. Sure, the blades and components in the nacelle need to be replaced from time to time, but that's just maintenance, you can maybe make an argument about it when the turbines and generators in a nuclear plant don't need maintenance and periodic replacement. In any case, even ignoring that, the extra steel is not such a big deal. It is recyclable after its long, long lifetime and it is also not scarce but plentiful. For the direct comparison with nuclear, both the wind farm and the nuclear plant have steel usage close enough to be in the same order of magnitude and the environmental cost of the steel for either is negligible compared to the amount they save by not being fossil fuels. Nuclear wins on this, but not by much. It is a consideration, but not one that weighs much versus the other considerations. I will also note that I ignored the more exotic and difficult materials. Doing so favors nuclear power since, even if they are only a small fraction of overall materials, their nature tends to outweigh that. For example, a 1 GWe nuclear plant will use over a thousand tons of nuclear fuel over its lifetime, costing something like $3 billion+ (hard to say over its lifetime since the price is pretty variable, but tends to outpace inflation over time). To compare to steel, the cost of new steel is about $820 per ton, so that $3 billion plus could buy $3.658 million tons of steel, dozens of times the actual amount of steel in either a 1 GW nuclear plant or an equivalent producing wind farm.

Solar is trickier. I can find sources saying that solar uses more materials than a nuclear plant, and sources saying less. Your fellow nuclear fanatic, MacMann, is fond of posting sources that compare material usage. However, his sources have a material breakdown for solar farms that show them using about five times more "cement" than "concrete" among other weird issues. It seems impossible to make sense of that. For nuclear and solar it seems like they are in the same ballpark with the material use once again representing far, far less waste than fossil fuels for ever of them. All I can really say there is that there is not enough difference either way for it to outweigh the other factors. It is certainly something to consider working on reducing, and I certainly think that things like concrete pads vs. ground anchors, etc. should be considered in the actual physical installation for solar.

All of the other factors we have touched on favor renewables over nuclear from my perspective. Except, as already mentioned, in niche uses.

It does not result in failure because there are not any problems with the renewables that we don't already know how to solve. I don't object to nuclear where it makes sense (the previously mentioned niches), but it does not make sense for standard power generation on the grid. The mix can include nuclear (especially still running older plants in good condition where they can be inexpensively and safely maintained), but it should not be a major component.

That does not account for the other four and a half percent or so that comes from burning things. An amount which, once again, should put France near or at the goal you previously mentioned for grams CO2 per kWh.

You're using a rolling estimate of yearly output? One that includes last month days after the month ended!!! Look, I should not have to explain to you the serious problems with that. I will if you need me to, but you should be able to explain yourself the multiple problems with that approach.

OK, this site you're using, it looks like they are well intentioned, but it is hard to tell how rigorous they are. Can you cite the actual primary sources the data you are using here is coming from. I was not able to immediately find it on their site.

So, you realize that's an 11.3% increase for Germany, but a 37% increase for France, right? Such a huge swing, apparently from dropping one month off the start of the data, and adding one month on at the end indicates a serious reliability problem. I am not doubting that the reality is a roughly one order of magnitude difference between France's CO2 production and that of Germany, at least in the electrical sector, but the actual precision of the numbers you present is in serious doubt.

I was not actually suggesting that you were saying to abandon anything. I may not have been clear enough. I was simply saying that, even if we devoted all resources for developing power sources entirely to nuclear, it would be impossible for it to bear fruit for quite a few years. It is not a strawman argument, just a recognition that there are finite resources to devote to this. In other words, there is an opportunity cost to choosing one over the other. That does not necessarily mean in terms of exclusivity, just that if we devote, for example, 50% of resources to one thing, we only have the remaining 50% of resources to devote to another. So we should devote our resources to whatever has the most utility. That can mean a hybrid approach of course, when one option has benefits the other lacks, and vice versa, so we have to consider all the relevant pros and cons. Cost is, of course, part of the calculation. Also, we have to consider what resources are being devoted because, while they may translate to monetary costs, all resources are not equal. You might be forced into, for example, a 60-40 split because using above 60% of a resource required for one choice would be unacceptable.

All that said though, there do not seem to be fundamental resource constraints that would prevent you from going 100% renewable, so that leaves the pros and cons. From what I can see, renewables have lower cost (even with battery backup), as well as a considerably shorter period to active power production, plus far greater flexibility in placement, cluster size, etc. The advantages nuclear plants seem to have are a fairly high capacity factor, around 93% and a relatively small land footprint (although geographic location is a tradeoff between either needing premium waterfront property, or increased cost and land usage to air cool). An argument about longevity is also often made, but it is not actually clear if that actually is the case considering the potential longevity of modern solar panels and the fact that the parts of wind towers that need replacing seem to have a similar schedule of replacement per MWh generated as their analogues in nuclear power plants.

So, given those tradeoffs, it could make some sense if there were severe land restrictions but, in most places, there are not. It could also make sense if there were a real concern about extended power outages if, for example, both the wind and sun stop. However with battery storage and other means of storage like hydro where available, combined with the size of the grid, and geographical variation, we're talking about once a decade or more events. Also, if you consider an overall goal of replacing not just electric power generation, but also primary power through electrification, and add in smart grid features then you have additional storage in the transportation sector in people's car batteries, and, if heat differential storage devices (not exactly unheard of in the form of hot water heaters and ice boxes) are put into places that heat pumps to increase the efficiency of the heat pumps by leveling out the peaks (in Winter, capture heat during the warmest times to use on the coldest nights, in summer, expel heat on the coolest nights to store cold for the hottest days) then that means a whole lot of extra electrical generation to cover dips with storage, storage both electrical and non-electric to offset usage, automatic conservation by smart grid aware devices, etc. With all that, there would not be a lot of need for the high capacity factor of nuclear power.

So, from my point of view, there is not a compelling benefit to nuclear that overrides its negatives in pretty much all but niche applications. Sure, maybe great for small, isolated places that are simultaneously too small for renewables, but also big enough to support a nuclear power plant (which can't really be economically scaled down below around 1 GWe). Also extreme remote locations like Arctic or Antarctic stations or deep space. For grid-connected, large countries without problematic weather anomalies and not too close to one of the poles to get good insolation, nuclear seems to make little sense. There's pretty much no way that a nuclear plant started today outside of niches where renewables aren't suitable couldn't be beaten to the punch by a renewable project started at the same time.

OK, then. That's just full on moronic.

Actually, I am a pragmatist who is quite interested in nuclear technology and its applications. I am also a pragmatist. I am also quite interested in technology in general. Due to those things, I evaluate technology based on utility. By virtually every metric I find suitable for measuring, current renewables seem to beat nuclear power as pragmatic power sources for the majority of both electrical generation and, longer-term, primary power generation. I have listed the reasons why over and over and over again.

I have looked at those numbers, evaluated them in the larger context of overall decarbonization of power, questioned the change over time of the numbers and, most critically pointed out that the 19 grams of CO2 per kWh generated seems to be impossible considering that France burns garbage to generate electricity and still has overall about 6% of its electricity generated by burning things. Since pretty much the absolute most efficient thing in terms of CO2 produced that you can burn for electricity is natural gas at 450 grams of CO2 per kWh, that 6% should have France up at least at 27 grams of CO2 per kWh, and probably higher. I have asked you about that multiple times and you just will not answer. Also, you go on and on about how much France generates from nuclear power, but it's actually 6% from burning stuff and about 67% from nuclear power. What do you think the other 27% is from? The simple fact is that you have not actually done any sort of critical analysis. You can play the schoolyard game of trying to turn the accusation around on me, but it is pretty obvious that you're the one who does not bother to inform themselves and ignores inconvenient facts due to your fanaticism ("Nuclear for life" as your .sig says)

For electricity generation alone, or for primary power in general? Also, can you confirm that France actually does meet this since your 19 g per kWh seems impossible given the facts.

Uh, sure. You know Volkswagen stopped being a state enterprise back in the 1960's, right? Technically, there were still some government owned shares, but they were divested years before the scandal. Also, there were a whole lot of car companies that were cheating (and let's face it, continue to) cheat on emissions testing. Yet another reason to move away from ICE vehicles, but not exactly some sort of indictment of the German government when it comes to figures on CO2 emissions from power generation. I mean, it's kind of hard to fake those numbers since the fuel consumption, efficiency of the plants, and typical CO2 produced when burning a particular fuel are all pretty well known and EU regulators as well as a ton of others would be all over a discrepancy in the numbers. All that said of course, I do not think that you are particularly reliable at sourcing your numbers because of the France CO2 per kWh discrepancy I have noted over and over again. I will give you the benefit of the doubt over whether you are cherrypicking, but I do suspect you may be comparing apples to oranges.

I don't recall having to pay that much for rentals, but like I said, these trips were when I was younger. They were also when I would splurge after saving up. In any case, it's not like I always did rentals, just when it made sense.

My logic on such trips is that vehicle range is not a huge obstacle for trips I would take for a long weekend. I generally avoid vacation trips where the travel time is too high a percentage of the actual vacation time. So, for a long weekend trip, I would not need a vehicle with either extended range or extra space (not to mention that one of my current vehicles is an ICE with extra space, although that just reminded me that the battery in it is dead and I need to charge the battery and take it for a drive).

The trips I was talking about were thousand plus miles each way to stay for a week at the very least. Also usually with about five people to locations with various pricey things to pay for.

I wasn't even really commenting on your actual argument. I'm not the poster you were discussing that with. I was actually just commenting on simply linking to youtube videos to support an argument without actually making the argument.

Fair enough. I was basically just trying to express that there is no general solution. However, what I should note is that one of the things that prevents a general solution is the assumption of an infinite universe. If the universe and information are finite and if the speed of light is the universal speed limit then it appears that they are (at least the observable universe, which is the universe for all intents and purposes) then many problems that fall apart because of problems with infinity no longer have that issue because a Platonic universe of math is just not actually a thing. In that case the universe can definitely be a simulation run on more capable hardware than our observable universe.

Well, it was more a work on theology and philosophy than math. But Pascal was a mathematician, so he should have known better than some of the mistakes he made. Of course, it was also from his private notes and he never published it and it may have been a disservice to him for anyone to have published it. He was almost certainly intending some version of the Wager for inclusion in a book on Christianity he was working on, but he might not have published it as it was.

Aside from just the possibility of a demon posing as a fake god, Pascal ignored, probably willfully, the multitude of other religions with mutually incompatible systems of eternal reward or punishment. The whole wager breaks down because it presents a false dichotomy: believe or don't believe when the options are actually to believe in the null set, {a}, {b}, {c}, {d}... or indeed in various combination sets. As it stood, Pascal was a Catholic, and clearly there's an issue, especially at the time as you point out with Catholicism vs. Protestantism. Additionally though, Pascal himself was part of a Catholic sect that was considered heretical by mainstream Catholicism. So the whole Wager is a mess from the start because of the false dichotomy.

This, of course, is not the only problem with the wager. The other major one of course is that Pascal did not have a modern understanding of infinity and was using it in arithmetic in ways that are invalid mathematically.

Well, while I would not necessarily use the term bootlicker, the term "christian apologist" certainly applied. In any case, Pascal was sickly through his entire life. Apparently he had Celiac disease and neurological problems and, when he died at 39, he had a severe brain lesion. It is quite possible that those medical issues led to the supposed religious experience he had in his early 30's. The description of it as a "night of fire" suggests to me that he may have had some sort of ecstatic seizure. That, combined with a lifetime of being sickly and with a potential expectation of early death probably pushed him towards rejection of "the god of philosophers" and embrace of Christianity. Sadly, after that, he largely abandoned any serious works on science and math and turned to religion and philosophy.

This is completely irrelevant. Do you not understand the difference between rhetoric and logic?

That is just idiotic. There are multiple equations of state that can describe water at its triple point. More to the point, are schizophrenic? Or high? The deep meaning that you seem to think these questions have seems like the result of a disassociative mental state.

Almost certainly not an infinitesimal point. General relativity is just a model, not some form of universal law.

What is your point with all this garbage. This last one seems like a tautology.

I am seeing a pattern here where a lot of your questions seem to be about a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of infinity and misapplication of that concept in basic arithmetic. Are you going to do Pascal's Wager next (among the flaws of which is the use of infinity in basic arithmetic)

Yep, more issues with infinity.

And, yet again, a problem with infinity.

I have good news, especially for the actual article under discussion rather than all this garbage you're tossing out. If the speed of light holds, then the observable universe is the universe and it is finite. That's one more nail in the coffin of both the topic that should actually be under discussion and for most of this nonsense you're throwing out devoid of any sort of context or argument. That's because a finite universe does not have a Platonic Universe of pure math as any part of it. Anything and everything that can be computed is actually finite, constrained by the material substance of the universe (matter, energy, other?). It is really, really, really, really big, but that would not be a problem for an even bigger computer to run the simulation on. Not that I put much stock in simulation theory. It's an interesting thought experiment to a point, but ultimately devolves into a just another form of nihilism. If it's true and we keep researching our universe, we will eventually find the Easter eggs if there are any. If there are not any Easter eggs, then it's simply unknowable to us and there's just no point in worrying about it.

Good grief, it's all just circular with you. As I posted, four posts back:

It's not a fact because it's undefined. What are your actual criteria for what constitutes success or failure in this context (and don't just post the two numbers you constantly post over again for this, it's a serious question). What objective criteria do you actually propose as concrete goalposts.

Why?