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Interesting article but very light on details. I would love to read the actual paper but looks like it was published in Science. The actual press release here: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/press... has slightly more info than the linked article. This link to the PDF from August 2014 with the theoretical basis is free: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/sta... It looks like they are boosting WDM signals so this would work with existing long-range infrastructure.

You sound delusional. Guess you should've payed attention in high school physics class.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

So sorry. You're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. Elon Musk is not going anywhere. No one's mining asteroids or setting up camp on Mars.

You, me, everyone else, right here, forever. Get over it.

Why? Never mind the "how" since your type never has an answer to that. Just : "why?"

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

Your dog-whistle of the "gravity well" gave you away as the childish dreamer known as a Space Nutter.

PS: Where's the water or air in the lifeless vacuum between rocks?

The same is said to be the case with clippy. The prototype version rarely appeared and when it did it was almost always correct and helpful. The shipping version was this animated character always sitting on the screen, raising the eyebrows in a distracting fashion, and obnoxiously autocorrecting a[i] into a[I].

I remember as a very young kid in the 70's hearing about the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment and wondering how they managed to aim and point the laser correctly and get it to return properly and all that. It still blows my mind today when I understand much more than I did back then, when I delve into even a cursory overview of the techniques the ongoing experiment uses to aim, point, and collect the photons to generate the experimental results.

Well, how do propose we avoid a repeat of hanging doors and pregnant chads, like in the Bush/Florida election, without computers?

Two points.

1) for spinning platters, being able to recover significant amounts of data after even one pass of zeros is a myth. See this article on recovering overwritten data or any of the top google results.

2) SSDs are different, but far easier to wipe if you get a good model. There is an ATA Secure Erase command, and you can use it directly with hdparm on linux. It takes seconds to wipe most SSDs this way.

However, firmware implementation of this is spotty. You will find some studies showing secure erase failures. But the paper is 4 years old, and manufacturers seem to have gotten better. So if you're REALLY concerned about this level of security, encrypt your SSDs and find a manufacturer that properly ATA Sanitize Block Erase.

Or you could just learn the damn rules.

lifting a very large weight with your excess electricity, then running a generator with it during peak loads or periods. (Did I say VERY large weight?)

Check out this article: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the.... According to that, you'd need to lift an 800 pound weight to 3 meters to get the equivalent of ... an AA battery! Add the cost of the chains, concrete, pulleys, gears, etc... to lift a huge amount of weight and this gets expensive quickly for the amount of storage you'd get.

There isn't enough lead in the world to build lead acid batteries to achieve enough storage. There isn't enough lithium either, nor enough nickel. This guy's a physicist who has genuinely "done the math":

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

As for pumped storage, that's even more laughable:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

Before assuming that we can produce simple fixes like this it's important to look at the limits of the planet we live upon. A future where we use sustainable energy will have to be a future where that energy is mostly used when it is abundant and where rather less is used when it is not abundant.

There isn't enough lead in the world to build lead acid batteries to achieve enough storage. There isn't enough lithium either, nor enough nickel. This guy's a physicist who has genuinely "done the math":

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

As for pumped storage, that's even more laughable:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

Before assuming that we can produce simple fixes like this it's important to look at the limits of the planet we live upon. A future where we use sustainable energy will have to be a future where that energy is mostly used when it is abundant and where rather less is used when it is not abundant.

Reversible Space Equals Deterministic Space says that for a Turing machine running in time T(n) & space S(n), you can get the space & time both linear in T(n) (as I suggested) or space O(S(n) log T(n)) with time O(T(n)^(1+epsilon)) or space O(S(n)) with time exponential in T(n). So there is a tradeoff, but the space does not have to be (more than linearly) worse if you are willing to wait (way too long, of course, unless you are already worrying about the heat death of the universe), & not much worse for space or time in the middle case.

Doing the math with the wrong numbers isn't informative. You've ignored the atmospheric losses suffered by ground-based systems -- clouds, dust, the opacity of air. I think you're also being much more generous in estimating the potential lifetime of ground-based systems than space-based ones, which skews your numbers.

It may be that the gains are small enough to not justify the launch costs, though that depends on how much we value land taken up by solar arrays.

Humanity's power generation is currently negligible compared to the amount of energy injected into Earth's ecosystem by the Sun. However, at current growth rates that will not hold true for long. If the current growth rate of about 2.3% is maintained (which it cannot be), then in about 400 years we will produce as much energy as falls on the Earth from the Sun. By that point in time, the surface temperatures on Earth would have raised by about 50 Celsius, making human habitation close to impossible.

Yay UCSD and Roger Revelle! More charts of the Keeling Curve, which passed 400 three months ago. "1700 to Present" is my favorite.

I'm still totally amazed people can't look at a before and after of the summer ice in the Arctic or glaciers in Patagonia and Glacier National Park and make the leap that, "Okay, releasing carbon from long-dead dinosaurs in the form of petroleum and coal results in atmospheric carbon dioxide which warms and expands oceans and makes ice melt."

Okay, fine, here's a link to pictures of glaciers melting over the last century.

1. Yep, the historic low was about 150 to 200 thousand yeas ago (the lowest was around 300 million years ago...give or take).

2. Yep, its been trending "down" that way for the last 600 million years. Nifty chart from the University of California

3. They do, but it varies from plant to plant. During the late Pleistocene, CO2 concentrations were 25% to 50% lower than at present, declining to values of 180 ppm during glacial periods. Studies have been done on plants growing with less then 50ppm (to find fast growing breeds). I would say under 30ppm would be the breaking point but could be as low as 25ppm...or even 15 on some high altitude/slow growing tree strains like firs and redwoods (some plants can go much lower but only like 5% of the ones we know of).

To all of those that posted doubting my math that we don't have enough material in the world to make a nation sized storage battery:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

To all those hating on my "rare earth" comments, my fingers jumped ahead on my thoughts about the battery when I meant the comment on rare earths only for the magnets in the flywheel motors. No rare earths metals in the batteries. Will need gobs of rare earth metals for efficient flywheel storage.

If you dispute the need for rare earth metals in the flywheels then so be it. With the earth's core made of nickel and iron it's quite likely we won't run out of those elements to make flywheel storage work. Problem still lies in the cost of producing the flywheels. Efficiency gains can be made in using the densest materials we can find in creating these flywheels. What elements in the earth's crust is abundant and dense? The top two on my list would be tungsten and... uranium. If we are going to mine uranium then why waste it in making an energy storage flywheel if we can use it as an energy source?

I thought you people cared about preserving the environment. You'd rather be digging up all kinds of lead for huge batteries, or steel for flywheels, than just get a little bit of thorium and uranium for a nuclear reactor. Shame on those of you suggesting pumped hydro, do you not feel for the delta smelt?

The way I see it solar and wind are environmental disasters just waiting to happen. They will kill birds in flight, disturb the landscape, poison the water, and I haven't even got to all the mining needed for the materials required yet. Solar and wind don't sound so "green" any more, do they?

There is no energy shortage.

I think you meant to say there is no power shortage. However we only have 56 years of proven reserves of oil, add another 4 years counting oil sands. To me that qualifies as a looming shortage of one of our primary source of energy. And that's all assuming zero increase in energy use, and as a corollary that about 85% of the population keeps on using 5 to 10 times less energy per person than Americans. So saying there's no energy shortage is a bit optimistic.

That said I'll grant you that although we only have 58 years of proven natural gas reserves, at least discoveries seem to be keeping pace. We'll see how that goes once the oil runs out however. Also while we can switch to other energy sources like wind and solar, they require an important initial investment of energy which will be hard once we start feeling the crunch.

Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation.

That's disingenuous when it's caused by a byproduct of our main sources of energy. CO2 is not something you can filter out of your car exhaust or that we can easily take out of power plants.

Geek doesn't mean "naive, wide-eyed dreamer". You are a Space Nutter and belong in a church, not a geek website.

Every single piece of scientific and engineering information shows that space is a no-go for the kind of grandiose fantasies you cling to.

http://www.distancetomars.com/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

"if someone wants to put a fucking space colony on the moon, FUCKING AWESOME."

Egyptians 5000 years ago built really fucking awesome tombstones. So?

" We're not going to get off this rock until people start doing shit, "

Well that solves that! BTW, for the curious, "get off this rock" is a Space Nutter dog whistle. You hear that, and pretty soon you'll a bunch of unrealistic naive dreamers show up with the "species" and the "asteroid of doom".

99% of these people are depressed, misanthropic programmers, ie the last people on Earth you should listen to for what's realistic in the real world.

"Fuck off, some of us have dreams."

Oddly, you always have exactly the same dream, the dream of the 1960s Space Age sci-fi, which itself was driven by Russian Cosmism mysticism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Where are the life extension dreamers? Where are the leisure society dreamers?

Your "dream" is basically the past of the USA, but with rockets.

Grow up, nutcase. Go talk to a girl or something.

Geek doesn't mean "naive, wide-eyed dreamer". You are a Space Nutter and belong in a church, not a geek website.

Every single piece of scientific and engineering information shows that space is a no-go for the kind of grandiose fantasies you cling to.

http://www.distancetomars.com/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

"if someone wants to put a fucking space colony on the moon, FUCKING AWESOME."

Egyptians 5000 years ago built really fucking awesome tombstones. So?

" We're not going to get off this rock until people start doing shit, "

Well that solves that! BTW, for the curious, "get off this rock" is a Space Nutter dog whistle. You hear that, and pretty soon you'll a bunch of unrealistic naive dreamers show up with the "species" and the "asteroid of doom".

99% of these people are depressed, misanthropic programmers, ie the last people on Earth you should listen to for what's realistic in the real world.

"Fuck off, some of us have dreams."

Oddly, you always have exactly the same dream, the dream of the 1960s Space Age sci-fi, which itself was driven by Russian Cosmism mysticism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Where are the life extension dreamers? Where are the leisure society dreamers?

Your "dream" is basically the past of the USA, but with rockets.

Grow up, nutcase. Go talk to a girl or something.

It is very hard to find suitable sites for pumped storage. Here is an old example: Storm King Mountain.

You should also read the feasibility analysis of pumped storage by Tom Murphy, a physics professor at UCSD

+5 Insightful?
No :
-5 for bullshit, willful ignorance and not reading the article you link to :

However, economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century,[2][3] and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals.[3]

You might want to take a look at this article about the energy trap : http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
You're talking about extraction price, you should talk about the energy return on investment : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Once it costs more energy to retrieve oil than to leave it in the ground, we'll have a big problem, and that hasn't been mentioned one bit by TFA.

If you think that mankind has a "destiny in space", you've got another thing coming. I liked Star Trek too, but unfortunately that's just not reality:

Stranded Resources

Asked and answered... Present growth rates give us about 450 years at best before we boil all the water off.

Mars Colonization?

Please! Stop with this obsession. Do the moon first.

And all we have is written human documentation of your "extinction level event". And there were no humans here a million years ago, what makes you think we will still be here in another million? (shrug)

"600 years ago you would also have been saying that it was a waste of time to build ocean going vessels"

Why? Boats were a fundamental part of our technology back then and all you needed was to float dead trees on the water. Water is a resource the way a vacuum isn't.

You don't even have water in space. You have nothing. A single person with a rock could float a dead tree on the water. Your space nonsense requires so many resources that if we *had* those resources, there IS no problem on the Earth worth leaving it !!!!

There's nothing fundamental science can do about that.

Space is dead, it's over, finished. We're not going anywhere. Fundamental science shows this. I suspect you're not exactly rational about this, and you think we'll find some sort of sci-fi "technology" that will cleverly go around all the limits fundamental science shows us.

Stephen Hawking may know his astrophysics, but that's all he's qualified for. A simple error of appeal to authority. The man's a mathematician. That's all he is. What if he told us we need to build a leisure society and get rid of the capitalist social model? Would you listen to him then?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the prattling of a dying man isn't worth much. The species may be doomed, but it always was, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. I suspect that's what really bothering you. We have plenty of evidence that our social models are unsustainable, not to mention immoral, unjust and evil. What are you doing about that?

Anyways, here's a practical physicist's opinion

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

You're a Space Nutter. Full stop.

Really? You've never seen the delirious and fervent beliefs of the Space Nutters?

Start here

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Tell me you've NEVER seen that kind of demented reply?

What if someone pretends to solve a complicated problem with an even more complicated solution, and simple math shows it makes no sense, does it matter if it's high-school level math?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

What "it"? Hydrogen? Yup, it's a huge failure.

What else? Oh, the space-based solar power fantasy that just won't die?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And electrons don't "die"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

(But I wish stupid sci-fi masquerading as real engineering would die.)

You seem to have a very muddled understanding of basic physics that has been known for over a hundred years. You're the one peddling "twaddle" if you seriously think space-based solar makes any sense at all.

Hey, how's the Solaren deal working out? You'd think there would be weekly updates on /. if it was so important?

We don't even have the Concorde anymore and you guys are still masturbating to 1960s cheap energy delusions!??

bahahhahaaaaaa

If we *did* have the capacity to manufacture, launch, and use space solar, we wouldn't have a resource problem in the first place!

Ohahahahahhha ha ha ha ahahaaa

IDIOTS

Your inner nerd failed high school.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And if you think global warming is bad with just natural sunlight, just imagine gathering MORE of it and beaming it to Earth!?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

One thing I've noticed about Space Nutters is that they're overwhelmingly software programmer types. In other words, they really don't know anything about physical reality. They assume that progress in Field A automatically means the same progress in Fields B, C, and D.

They've spent their entire lives gobbling up sci-fi TV, novels, and hanging out with like-minded comic book fans, and spent their time speculating about various doomsday scenarios, sometimes stretching into the billions of years into the future.

Completely ignoring the fact that evolution is still happening, and therefore no matter what there won't BE a human race in a far shorter time interval than that!

In other words, they have far more in common with a religion, complete with its doomsday scenario, its criteria for good and bad behavior, and its Promised Land (which apparently is anything but land).

Pay enough attention, you'll see the same tired old clichés and hackneyed fallacious "arguments" trotted out with monotonous regularity.

They squeal like vampires in sunlight when you try to understand the origins of their religion.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

And facts don't get in their way.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And the more grandiose and improbable their fantasy, the stronger the belief.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

It's a jejune, failed philosophy from an earlier, naive era and should be buried along with steam locomotives, corsets, and buggy whips.

One thing I've noticed about Space Nutters is that they're overwhelmingly software programmer types. In other words, they really don't know anything about physical reality. They assume that progress in Field A automatically means the same progress in Fields B, C, and D.

They've spent their entire lives gobbling up sci-fi TV, novels, and hanging out with like-minded comic book fans, and spent their time speculating about various doomsday scenarios, sometimes stretching into the billions of years into the future.

Completely ignoring the fact that evolution is still happening, and therefore no matter what there won't BE a human race in a far shorter time interval than that!

In other words, they have far more in common with a religion, complete with its doomsday scenario, its criteria for good and bad behavior, and its Promised Land (which apparently is anything but land).

Pay enough attention, you'll see the same tired old clichés and hackneyed fallacious "arguments" trotted out with monotonous regularity.

They squeal like vampires in sunlight when you try to understand the origins of their religion.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

And facts don't get in their way.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And the more grandiose and improbable their fantasy, the stronger the belief.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

It's a jejune, failed philosophy from an earlier, naive era and should be buried along with steam locomotives, corsets, and buggy whips.

One thing I've noticed about Space Nutters is that they're overwhelmingly software programmer types. In other words, they really don't know anything about physical reality. They assume that progress in Field A automatically means the same progress in Fields B, C, and D.

They've spent their entire lives gobbling up sci-fi TV, novels, and hanging out with like-minded comic book fans, and spent their time speculating about various doomsday scenarios, sometimes stretching into the billions of years into the future.

Completely ignoring the fact that evolution is still happening, and therefore no matter what there won't BE a human race in a far shorter time interval than that!

In other words, they have far more in common with a religion, complete with its doomsday scenario, its criteria for good and bad behavior, and its Promised Land (which apparently is anything but land).

Pay enough attention, you'll see the same tired old clichés and hackneyed fallacious "arguments" trotted out with monotonous regularity.

They squeal like vampires in sunlight when you try to understand the origins of their religion.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

And facts don't get in their way.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And the more grandiose and improbable their fantasy, the stronger the belief.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

It's a jejune, failed philosophy from an earlier, naive era and should be buried along with steam locomotives, corsets, and buggy whips.

Short answer: See the blog entry on 28 OCT 2014. If the "shard" is properly distributed in enough places, then one can always get the file. They cite the privately verifiable scheme discussed here: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav...

The Babel Fish Argument for the Non-Existence of God (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams): ... The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. ... Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

(Caveat: I don't necessarily agree with that!)

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Are there still a lot of resources out there if it takes more resources to get them in the first place?

I don't know exactly what you think our technology is able to do, but I assure you no one is paying billions to go get a cup of gravel from space.

Even less so if you think we desperately need gravel in orbit.

It's fascinating how many people are still brainwashed by the space age propaganda from the 1960s weapons manufacturers.

"It's not about ICBMs and blowing up Russians, we at Autonetics Neutrodyne are all about , uh, the species and colonies and stuff! Look at our posters!"

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Are there still a lot of resources out there if it takes more resources to get them in the first place?

I don't know exactly what you think our technology is able to do, but I assure you no one is paying billions to go get a cup of gravel from space.

Even less so if you think we desperately need gravel in orbit.

It's fascinating how many people are still brainwashed by the space age propaganda from the 1960s weapons manufacturers.

"It's not about ICBMs and blowing up Russians, we at Autonetics Neutrodyne are all about , uh, the species and colonies and stuff! Look at our posters!"

Well, I am really just talking about energy, and I was off by a few years. Sorry for the confusion.

Point is that machine made objects don't cost us anything(they won't in the future anyway). We shouldn't have to pay anybody if they put no effort into it and the machine did it all. I think what people are scared of is the their precious capitalism will become obsolete, and their social/economic privileges and advantages will vanish. So they spread FUD that we will starve if we don't keep making trinkets for them.

"it's reasonable to assume that the speed of light barrier will be overcome."

How is it in any way "reasonable"? We don't travel anywhere even near below the speed of light, and as a matter of fact we used to travel faster than sound but now we don't even have Concorde anymore.

Our entire civilization is running on fumes and we're scrambling to get the last dregs of fossil fuels out of the Earth. Where does your naive, almost child-like naive optimism come from?

" we have no way to know"

But we do know NOW. And everything points to : game over.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Let me guess: you're a programmer.

You got it straight. What's so shocking about it?

Imagination doesn't move mass.

http://distancetomars.com/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

You made me laugh pretty bad, I forgot to link to you the Master File of Space Nuttery:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

No Space Nutters there either, I guess?

So did you send your job application to be Musk's chief eunuch ball washer in his Mars condo?

You made me laugh pretty bad, I forgot to link to you the Master File of Space Nuttery:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

No Space Nutters there either, I guess?

So did you send your job application to be Musk's chief eunuch ball washer in his Mars condo?

Baffling premise. You hysterical Space Nutters are crazy.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Baffling premise. You hysterical Space Nutters are crazy.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

We can't believe you think this is a serious issue. It's mind-boggling. There are 7 billion people right here right now and 200,000 more every day. In the entire history of mankind only 18 people have gone further than Low Earth orbit. For three days.

That's it. Space is over. It's finished. It's not a Walmart full of platinum, it's not a holy vacuum ocean for us to traverse, there's no manifest destiny.

Meteorites fall to the Earth every day, do you have a titanium roof on your house? No? Why not?

Because doomsday nutters like you rarely actually believe your own crap, you just feed on the emotion, the drama and the Gothic poetry.

And again, another programmer with completely batshit beliefs about space unmasked!

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

"I can't believe I'm practically the only one who can figure this out whenever this topic keeps popping up."

Oh wow, do you fellate yourself too when you "figure this out"? Oh you're SO smart!!

"For one thing, testing various methods for keeping humans alive, healthy, and sane in space."

We already know how to do that. Put them on a planet. Problem solved, we're already here.

"We need to expand beyond Earth."

Who's "we"? What "need"? Simply baffling.

". To do that, we'll need space stations as jump-off points"

Wow.
Complete nonsense.

http://www.distancetomars.com/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Put down the Battlestar Galactica DVDs and get a grip.

"Space is the future"

"was". The 1960s are over. We don't even have Concorde anymore and you loons are planning the future of the human race in space?

Crackpotted delusional nuttery.

Hilarious, the scientific method from someone pushing the most unscientific crap possible.

Challenge: find something wrong here
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

You have a very limited understanding of what is actually possible with real technology. And if you thought the climate change was bad NOW, imagine pumping in even more energy!

Thank deity that none of you children are in charge of anything more complex than the soft drink fountain at the 7/11.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Ain't ever. EVER. gonna happen, EVER, under any understanding of reality.

E V E R.

So it should be pretty easy to find some of these posts in which I make these admissions?

And if you think these arguments are stupid

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

when they're based on solid physics and math and reality, well you're right. We're not having a reality-based discussion.

What we're having is one guy shouting and waving quasi-religious space propaganda posters from the 1970s, and a healthy skeptic using reality.

It's quite amazing the reactions when you tell people no one's going anywhere and the space dreams of the past are ludicrous.

So it should be pretty easy to find some of these posts in which I make these admissions?

And if you think these arguments are stupid

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

when they're based on solid physics and math and reality, well you're right. We're not having a reality-based discussion.

What we're having is one guy shouting and waving quasi-religious space propaganda posters from the 1970s, and a healthy skeptic using reality.

It's quite amazing the reactions when you tell people no one's going anywhere and the space dreams of the past are ludicrous.