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They're confused with the definition of death. In my opinion, the best definition comes from cyronics: Information Theoretic Death.

http://www.merkle.com/definiti...

WRT these pig brains, they're experiencing iscemic damage that may result in infodeath, but it's a slide into that vs a singular moment of death. Of course some cells still work, only 4 hours passed from loss of blood flow.

This reminds me of Project Pluto, a 1955 attempt to design a nuclear-powered autonomous ramjet capable of loitering for months and then nuking sixteen separate cities. It's just about the coolest example of '50s-era engineering hubris ever. They got as far as building and testing a couple of nuclear engines before pulling the plug.

There was a great article about the project in Air and Space Magazine. From the article:

"Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."

There were serious concerns that if the thing got off its leash, it would just wander the planet for months, raining radioactive waste on everything.

Does anyone know if Steve has considered cryonic suspension?

Does he even know about it?

Everyone is either in the experimental group (those who are suspended) or the control group (everyone else).

I would sure like Steve to be in the experimental group. http://www.merkle.com/cryo/

Besides, I think he would rather interested in how Apple does over the next 50-100 years (maybe even less depending on how fast things develop).

You know what was hotter than a Nuclear Aircraft? A attack drone, that flies at mach 3 with a scram jet "fueled" by exposing its nuclear core directly to the atmosphere, and it carries 16 1MT nukes.

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

Indeed.

It's too bad we didn't finish it; this sounds like just the thing that certain areas of the Middle East and Afghanistan need.

Project Pluto got pretty far - they tested the nuclear ramjet engines for example, and the TERCOM guidance system invented for Pluto was later used by the Tomahawk cruise missile.

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)

There's an excellent documentary with video of test firing on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e88WtJvSt7E

That was Project Pluto, the best weapons system ever

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

I've got to go back and hunt down the issue about the Russians having a Nuclear Powered Airplane, and that we were going to have our own in 18 months.

Well, the US military at least in fact had the technology: Project Pluto.
They just never flew it, because it would have irradiated large amounts of land. A rare victory for common sense at the time.

"I think that the human brain may be closer to the limits of having to make those difficult inherent trade offs between accuracy and computation time than we might hope."

I'm glad you THINK, now try looking up some facts before assuming that the people who've spent their lives looking into these things weren't able to address your points:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann's_limit

"2.56 × 10^47 bits per second per gram."

http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html

"It seems reasonable to conclude that the human brain has a raw computational power between 10^13 and 10^16 operations per second."

Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive.
Cells dehydrate.

Please keep in mind that thousands of people are walking around TODAY who were once frozen... as embryos.

The reason US cars don't burn plutonium is the green lobby.

Actually when you read about nuclear propulsion it could have powered some truly awesome things e.g.

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself.

Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)

Perhaps a nuclear powered flying crowbar?

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

Where is The Flying Crowbar? I think it must be one of the most scary weapons ever. An unshielded nuclear reactor used to propel a unmanned flight to drop bombs and irradiate the USSR. Possibly one of the most frightening weapons ever attempted.

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

What about a personal version of the project pluto nuclear ramjet?

Very simple design - you collect air, heat it up and squirt it out the back. You have no shortage of air and the reactor can stay hot for ages.

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

You'd need some very advanced neutron shield of course. But a nuclear ramjet gives you unlimited flight time and no problems with reaction mass. And if you can shield the pilot from neutrons it seems like you could shield the air too, so the exhaust wouldn't be radioactive. In fact I'm not sure that air, mostly Oxygen and Nitrogen, would absorb neutrons even if it were not shielded. There's a probelm if you crash of and crack the shielding of course.

It would be pure st00pid to build a nuclear ground to orbit to ground space plane. Without sufficient shielding anything electronic aboard would have its circuits destroyed. With sufficient shielding it'd never get off the ground.

In any case, a nuclear propulsion design was considered for a cruise missile platform for nuclear warhead delivery. The "Flying Crowbar" http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html was probably one of the all time worst designs for a weapon or a flying device. Even those parts not intended to be part of the weapons package were extremely deadly weapons as a by product of normal operation.

A NERVA type design for nuclear propulsion could be built and operated in orbit, possibly, though getting the fissionables up there would face much resistance. But something that'll fly in atmosphere going up or coming down? A break up at high altitude and Mach speeds (the mostly likely time it'd have problems other than launch) and it'd spread radioactive debris over a large area. The Challenger was spread over 480 square miles.

No, a nuclear design for this kind of flight profile should never happen. H2/O2, or possibly some of the newly developed (somewhat) stabilized boron propellants would do the job. A zero stage of dropped jet engines to get it up to > 50k ft. would make those propellants much more capable of doing the job.

Cryogenic Incarceration anyone?

Sounds like a version of Cryonics that might actually work. Anyone remember seeing news items on those vaults full of corpses frozen in liquid nitrogen since the 60's?

In comparison, the world's fastest supercomputer (BlueGene/L) is rated at a maximum of 183,500 gigaflots, which is about 0.2 peta flops, or one fiftieth of the maximum speed of the human brain.

Now, you don't NEED the full processing power of the human brain in order to drive. That's not my point. My point is that a car-load of computer parts, at the current level of technology, is probably going to drive about as well as a Horseshoe Crab. I'm actually very impressed that developers have actually got as far as they have, as they're very unlikely to be using state-of-the-art technology for this, most are probably using pile-of-PC architectures, not much more than some webcams for vision and basic motors for the robot linkage, most likely continuous for power - steppers have vastly superior accuracy but have no force behind them.

You also have to look at the power cleaning systems they need - car batteries are NOT smooth and car electrical systems are typically pretty rough. On the other hand, computers need power that is spike-free and ADCs (analog-to-digital converters) rely on a steady reference voltage to be able to do anything useful. A noisy power system would be Bad News for a self-operating vehicle. Oh, and computers don't do well when hot, but air conditioning units - particularly if they switch on and off - are going to add some serious noise to the power.

Whoever builds a car that can go a decent distance is worthy of vast respect and awe, because there are some massive technical problems that require ingenious hacking of mechanical, electrical and microelectronic systems to operate in some pretty harsh environments.

I do think DARPA would be foolish to end the contest if there is a winner this year - rather, they should extend the challenge. Have the vehicles go through a wider range of terrains, as a multi-stage rally, perhaps, with cars who succeed in the desert then having to navigate through a forest, swamps, along the tops of snow-covered mountains - pretty much any terrain that a vehicle could realistically encounter if used for military missions.

If DARPA did that, and the contestents succeeded, then (and pretty much only then) would DARPA have a general-purpose robotic vehicle they could throw into any arena that would be hazardous for humans under combat conditions. Why stop when you have something that could have made things easier three years ago had it existed, but which may be useless in a scenario three years from now, when the dangers may be completely different?

> All it takes to simulate a human brain is 22.8 teraflops?
> I thought I was smarter than that.

A rough guess seems to come in at around 100 teraops or more.

In a paper by Hans Moravec, one guess is 10^14 instructions per second (Extrapolation of retina
equivalent computer operations.)

While another by Ralph Merkle, suggests 10^13 - 10^16 operations per second, based on power consumption,

and yet another by Robert McEachern suggests 10^17 FLOPS (Floating Point Operation Per Second, more comparable to computer based math and what is discussed here.)

1 x 10^12 = 1 Tera

Thusly, 10^13 = 10 T, 10^14 = 100 T, 10^15 = 1000 T or 1 P, 10^16 = 10 P, and 10^17 = 100 P (or 100,000 TeraOps)

These numbers of course all depend on the method of measurement, what is being measured, and how much bearing that particular feature matters..
Sorta as meaningless/meaningful as CPU MHZ speed goes, and likewise, comparing a computer to a brain is going to run into the same problem.

However I think its safe to say, that as long as the computers hardware works like it does and not like our brains, then it will need to simulate our hardware in software, and thus two numbers matter: 1) how fast the computer can simulate the various actions of nurons, and 2) how fast those nurons need to function to compare to a real brain. As with all forms of emulation, the host system needs to be faster than the target, usually to an order of magnatude or more...

However, they didn't really say their simulation would be running at full/live speed... Researchers can still learn alot from this even if it takes a day to process a minute or two of brain time...

It'd be great if NASA (or someone higher up on the food chain) had the cojones to put an orion drive on a probe.

You mean like Deep Space 1 [nasa.gov]? It sounds like you have a good proposal for a mission. Personally, I think particle and fields science is pretty dull.

No, no, NO! He meains Orion Drive, not Ion Drive. The Orion Drive was thought up in the 50s, when other great ideas, like the Flying Crowbar were being developed. Compare detonating nuclear bomblets as a propulsive force (Orion Drive) with accelerating a harmless, inert gas through an electric field (Ion Drive). Which would you prefer malfunctioning catastrophically?

Ok, I realize this isn't quite the same thing...

You are your brain.

Your brain is information.

The degree of information retrieval from a frozen brain is dependent upon the sophistication of the information retrieval technology. Same as retrieving information from a shattered hard drive. It can be done, but you need some good equipment.

Cryonics DOES preserve information, but is it enough for revival?

Well, how much information is preserved depends not so much on the cryopreserative technology used today, but instead on how sophisticated is the information retrieval technology of the future.

But "the future" when it comes to reviving a frozen cryo, is NOT set. If the information retrieval technology at year N is not sufficient to revive, then wait K years.

So, I hope you see that the odds are quite possibly good that there will exist some year N + m*K years from today in which the information retrieval technology is sufficiently sophisticated.

So, in retrospect, destroying information LONGTERM is actually difficult.

For more information on Information Theoretic Death, see Ralph Merkle here and here and here.

You are your brain.

Your brain is information.

The degree of information retrieval from a frozen brain is dependent upon the sophistication of the information retrieval technology. Same as retrieving information from a shattered hard drive. It can be done, but you need some good equipment.

Cryonics DOES preserve information, but is it enough for revival?

Well, how much information is preserved depends not so much on the cryopreserative technology used today, but instead on how sophisticated is the information retrieval technology of the future.

But "the future" when it comes to reviving a frozen cryo, is NOT set. If the information retrieval technology at year N is not sufficient to revive, then wait K years.

So, I hope you see that the odds are quite possibly good that there will exist some year N + m*K years from today in which the information retrieval technology is sufficiently sophisticated.

So, in retrospect, destroying information LONGTERM is actually difficult.

For more information on Information Theoretic Death, see Ralph Merkle here and here and here.

You are your brain.

Your brain is information.

The degree of information retrieval from a frozen brain is dependent upon the sophistication of the information retrieval technology. Same as retrieving information from a shattered hard drive. It can be done, but you need some good equipment.

Cryonics DOES preserve information, but is it enough for revival?

Well, how much information is preserved depends not so much on the cryopreserative technology used today, but instead on how sophisticated is the information retrieval technology of the future.

But "the future" when it comes to reviving a frozen cryo, is NOT set. If the information retrieval technology at year N is not sufficient to revive, then wait K years.

So, I hope you see that the odds are quite possibly good that there will exist some year N + m*K years from today in which the information retrieval technology is sufficiently sophisticated.

So, in retrospect, destroying information LONGTERM is actually difficult.

For more information on Information Theoretic Death, see Ralph Merkle here and here and here.

Shame those projects got dropped....

Tho' I must admit, given the chance to work on something like that it would be hard to resist... :-)

The U.S. had a perfectly good functioning nuclear ramjet and abandoned the project. There were also fission rocket engines built, quite powerful ones.

<sarcasm> I wonder why those projects got dropped.. ?</sarcasm>

Tho' I must admit, given the chance to work on something like that it would be hard to resist... :-)

And if you are thinking about replying to this along the lines of "cryonic suspension is a fantasy" go read the facts first, e.g. The Molecular Repair of the Brain.

Robert

1. They're already all dead
2. They'll soon all be dead
3. They'll soon all be dead if you don't get your big-ass ship into orbit
4. You just don't give a shit about damn groundhogs. (WTF can they do to you once you've built your moon city?!!)
5. You work for the US government

"What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself. SLAM's simple but revolutionary design called for the use of nuclear ramjet power, which would give the missile virtually unlimited range. Air forced into a duct as the missile flew would be heated by the reactor, causing it to expand, and exhaust out the back, providing thrust. Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)"

Not really.

this uses 17 watts.

The human brain uses about 25 watts

What you say is absolutely true. One of my favorite quotes goes: "What the computer revolution did for manipulating data, the nanotechnology revolution will do for manipulating matter, juggling atoms like bits." -- Ralph Merkle

Right now, we're necessarily stuck between these complementary revolutions (by quite a few decades--seems to be the natural order of things), and most of our (IP greed) problems stem from the this.

We have general purpose computers, but no general purpose "replicators" yet. And so, since food, and other goods/services, are still physically scarce, some people will want... no, need... to make information artificially scarce in order to inflate its value enough to exchange it for food.

But once the necessities of life are essentially free, society can at long last end the rat-race and live in a stress-free gift economy (99.5%); a life based on fulfillment, rather than mundane survival. Oh, and just because capitalism isn't a driving force anymore, it doesn't erase the human COMPETITIVE forces at work; progress will still continue without the fear of starving.

(the other 0.5% is the amount of capitalism we would still need. You know... a form of "privelage currency" that you can strive for in order to trade for physically scarce things like prime Earth real-estate on the beach, or to meet a physically scarce celebrity, or to grease that NWO politician, or what have you.)

Bring back project Pluto! - see also SLAM, powered by the mighty Tory IIC
launching 55 gal drums with nuclear power!
Dr Strangelove, I presume?.
Discussion of project pluto
Sheesh, the word insane comes to mind.

There was a study in the 50's called Project Pluto that was an air-breathing ram jet fueled by a nuclear reactor. Kinda cool, and some of the events around it were pretty nutso.

Richard Feynmen (sp? you know, the famous funny nuclear dude), while working on the really big bombs, had an idea that you could power a jet engine with a reactor. So he patented it. At that time the scientists were allowed to patent their ideas they came up with on the project. As a side note, they also got a dollar for each patent, but no one really bothered. Until Feynman found out, and demanded his dollar. Anyways, more funny mayhem ensued, which he talks about in his books.

He never really thought about the idea until Project Pluto came along independently. The scientists there found out there was a patent on the idea, much to their surprise. To they contacted who they thought was the expert, Feynman. He was surprised they contacted him and just said it was a back of the napkin patent, and he really wasn't the expert.

There's some info on Project Pluto here:
http://www.nv.doe.gov/news&pubs/publications/histo ryreports/news&views/pluto.htm

http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/project_pluto.htm l

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/

Kooky stuff...

Jason

Reminds me of Project Pluto, the "Flying Crowbar", a nuclear ramjet researched in the 50s.

It is most unfortunate that yet another individual wasn't prepared for a premature death. Someone with this his education and technical awareness should certainly have been signed up for cryonics. For readers who want to call that crazy, don't hit the submit key until you have read the the detailed commentary by Ralph Merkle on how molecular nanotechnology may be used to repair the damage caused by freezing. Be informed and be prepared or be dead. Its pretty simple logic. It is very sad that Douglas Adams wasn't informed enough and smart enough to follow this path. Until Mind Uploading becomes feasible, cryonics is the only viable option we have available defeating death.

It is most unfortunate that yet another individual wasn't prepared for a premature death. Someone with this his education and technical awareness should certainly have been signed up for cryonics. For readers who want to call that crazy, don't hit the submit key until you have read the the detailed commentary by Ralph Merkle on how molecular nanotechnology may be used to repair the damage caused by freezing. Be informed and be prepared or be dead. Its pretty simple logic. It is very sad that Douglas Adams wasn't informed enough and smart enough to follow this path. Until Mind Uploading becomes feasible, cryonics is the only viable option we have available defeating death.

Did a lot of work on basic molecular modeling out of PARC.
Of course, the fact that he left there in 1999 is also relevant to this thread.
*sigh*... I worked for Xerox AI Systems in 1986-8; we were one of Xerox's many attempts to commercialize PARC research in AI and Lisp. Our record for cooperation with PARC was mixed - they loaned us Larry Masinter and Bill van Melle when we were implementing Xerox Common Lisp, and that was an enormous help, but getting stuff out of them without specific direction was often difficult.

self-replication and self-assembly mean factories turn into tanks, without spewing toxic chemicals all over the place. we would probably almost entirely stop using roads for shipping (and transportation in cities) in favor of extremely fast underground subways. we can smear the roads with an extremely tough substance which essentially acts as a solar panel that you can drive on and lasts for quite a long time. it's a very good way to get power -- you take otherwise useless radiating heat from the roads outside, and you release it out your roof, and on the way it's done a little work. toxic waste? that's one of the easiest of all to take care of. think of the bacteria that scientists are developing to "eat" oil slicks. it's more than possible to break down, molecule by molecule, entire toxic waste dumps into basically whatever you would like.

disadvantages: grey goo. if something eats up the entire earth, the environment will go, along with everything else. there are quite a lot of people worrying about this -- we anticipated it, so it's likely we can take care of the risk (through blue goo or similar)

there are other advantages: perfect recycling at a molecular level, basically an end to cancer and many other lethal and debilitating diseases, a chance to explore our galaxy... there are disadvantages as well -- but the environmental condition is not likely to be one of them.

Lea

Silicon technology is still a bulk technology. The most likely candidates for a further circuit miniaturization are what is called "molecular electronics." These involve using organic molecules with dimensions of several dozen angstroms for swithces and interconnects. People are already working very hard on metal contacts to organic molcular componet. There was a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on Quantum and Nanoscale Devices and an article titled "Molecular Electronics" by Prof. Reed of Yale EE dept surveyed the field.

The Most striking figures in that article were (i) a very tiny organic molecular diode which operated at room temperature with voltages around +/- 0.5 volt, and (ii) a resonant tunneling device at room temp. with similar voltages. These are highly practical voltages and temperatures! The biggest obstacle is to integrate these devices.

The variety of possibilities offered by organic molecules in conjunction with metals and other solid materials is simply staggering. What is going to open the floodgates is development of techniques to integrate these tiny devices with tiny interconnects in an inert matrix.

Zyvex and the Foresight Institute website are the best resources for information on this subject. Particularly, the writings of Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle.

That said, you can find some nanotech links here:

• * My think tank's Innovation page has links to stories and other related sites.

  * The Open Directory Project has a number of great links here, including a link to the important Foresight Institute.

  * And, of course, there is Ralph Merkle's page.

Good luck. I wish /. had some rule that we would only offer assistance to students who let us read their finished products.

A. Keiper
Washington, D.C.

Of course, Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation started it all. Unbounding the Future , by Drexler, Chris Peterson, and Gayle Pergamit, is a less technical popularization of the ideas put forth in Engines. Drexler's Nanosystems is the authoritative technical book on the subject.

Zyvex researcherRalph Merkle is acknowledged worldwide as one of foremost authorities on nanotechnology; his nanotech website is the definitive starting place for locating nanotech resources on the web.

I am sure many more will post a lot, since there were a lot of people there who, not to make a stereotype, looked like they read slashdot.

On the contrary, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the audience who turned up. They were not stereotypical "geeks" (whatever that means) -- the audience was very diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and gender.

Ralph Merkele, a nanotech man, made some excellent comments on offensive and defensve uses of new inventions. The idea being that an innovation that is primarily defensive (ie: a castle) is good, while offensive developments (the atom bomb) are bad. But his best point came when refuting Bill Joy's worries. He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will.

Merkle was actually a pioneer in cryptography. He has a website here. I'm not really convinced by Merkle's arguments. The distinction between "offensive and defensive" weapons seems kind of bogus to me -- there's a saying that the best defense is a strong offense, and to make an example, in terms of nuclear arms, the threat of offense has served as a defense.

The best defense to me seems to be social ones rather than technological ones. We have to, as a species, learn to deal with these new challenges, to grow up ethically, so to speak. We've succesfully (I hope) navigated the threat of nuclear destruction, with much pain and suffering in between, and the greatest danger seems to me that this be repeated with the advent of machine life, before we learn as a species to deal with this maturely.

I don't quite buy Joy's arguments either. I don't really see how self-replicating nano-machines present a qualitatively different threat from existing biological weapons. But yes, the danger will come if the ability to create such machines is widespread so that anybody can build one on his desktop.

He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will

Not convincing either. Some people will try to put the code on the machines. What happens then?

On a final note, I couldn't belive how RUDE some of the audience was.

Yes, but I thought it was also a good thing that the audience wasn't overawed by the panel.

• Computers
• Networks
• Medicine
• Business
• Law
• Government
• War
• Everything Else

damn. i'd put some money on them being the first to market on any nanotech.

Dr. Ralph Merkle, crypto-god, is now working for them and no doubt played a big part in getting this funding for nanotech (which Zyvex will no doubt see some of). - Uberdog

damn. i'd put some money on them being the first to market on any nanotech.

Dr. Ralph Merkle, crypto-god, is now working for them and no doubt played a big part in getting this funding for nanotech (which Zyvex will no doubt see some of). - Uberdog

I remember reading that the human brain has a storage capacity of approximately 122 MB. It's explained here.