Slashdot Mirror
Mad Scientist Brings Back Dead With "Deanimation"
mattnyc99 writes "Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist (who also figured out how to diagnose lupus correctly) went from watching his infant daughter die to literally reincarnating animals. Inspired by NOVA and funded by DARPA, Roth has developed a serum for major biotech startup Ikaria that successfully accomplished 'suspended animation' — the closest we've ever come to simulating near-death experiences and then coming back to life. From the article: 'We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does — it burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O2 until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related. Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?' " The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism." If you can suspend your inner critic for a time, it's a fun ride.
Braiiiiins!
Klatu Verata Nictu!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This reminds me of a This American Life episode I listened to (and you can too by clicking on Full Episode here). Basically it explores a very bad chapter of early cryogenics. Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
Also, isn't Ikaria the worst name to pick? "Hey, our company hopes to aim too high and fail hard." They should have gone with Promethea in my opinion.
My work here is dung.
This sounds just like a story by H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West—Reanimator.
Is it any coincidence that DARPA is Sanskrit for arrogance in this situation?
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
I think this article will open up a can of worms on Slashdot. The issue I have here is that bringing someone back from suspended animation where they were alive to begin with is not the same as 'reviving the dead'. I think nature has been doing this in hibernating animals for millions of years. If someone could freeze a medically dead person and then make him alive again with his memories, personality etc. intact, (i.e. not cloning, which is already feasible) then they can claim they have revived the dead. Other than that, it is just playing with semantics.
You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.
My blog
Quick, get him CVS commit access to all the BSD projects!
Trolling is a art,
and... "Thaw me out when robot wives are cheap and effective. PS - please alter my pants as fashion dictates."
Only in the USA and UK. Everywhere else, you'd be too hot to call it living.
"We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?'"
And what kind of "life" would it be?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
...when he wrote "It's a weird thing about scientists--you would think that they would love science fiction. But they don't."
If you'll excuse my French: bullshit!
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
This needed for long space travel but warp / hyper drives are better.
"Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist (who also figured out how to diagnose lupus correctly)" I stopped reading right there. It's never Lupus.
Im pretty sure the average comfort zone of humans is between 15 and 25 degrees. I find it odd that they picked such a high number. Are they trying to set the upper bound of human tolerance or something?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Am I the only one who had a Tron flashback and read that as 'deresolution'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugu search zombie
that will be cured.
And no, overpopulation won't be a problem becasue humans, like all biological creatures will only expand to meet the amount of food that is available.
The rest will starve.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, this could be useful in space travel, barring we develop hyperdrives. Sci fi have been playing around with sleeper ship concepts for decades. It might also be useful for people who have terminal cancer for example, who might want to opt to be frozen in the hope of a cure being developed during the interim (though there will be the problem of reintegrating into society after even just a few years). A more plausible use maybe is to put into suspended animation a critically injured person until he can be transported to a hospital and treated to minimise cell damage (assuming the serum does less damage).
It's been the holly grail for many reasons. Say you have a heart transplant patient that has less than a day to live and is waiting on a new heart. Even a few days would increase radically their chance of survival. It could potentially be extended to organs themselves. Imagine warehousing organs until needed. It's not just handy for extreme things like space travel there are more practical uses.
Zombies that cant move sound like vegetables and they arent very fun at all.
"Who would have known playing God could have such terrible consequences?"
Bender Bending Rodriguez
This needed for long space travel but warp / hyper drives are better.
Sorry to rain on your party but we are never going to have a warp or hyper drive. They were designed around the scheduling of TV advertisements, not the laws of physics.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Not all life burns oxygen. Unless there's some chemistry I'm forgetting (certainly possible).
Fire Bad! Aaaaaaagh!!
The pufferfish is also reported to be one of the main ingredients used in voodoo to turn people into zombies. According to ethnobotanist Wade Davis, the pufferfish is the key ingredient in the first step of creating a zombie, where the tetrodotoxin creates a death-like state. In the second step, hallucinogens are used to hold the person in a will-less zombie state. There was considerable skepticism to Davis's claims; he was widely accused of fraud, and there has been no final statement as to the veracity of his findings.[3]
If even Wikipedia doubts you, your doing it wrong.
My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It's better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.
Out of the blue and into the black
They give you this, but you pay for that
And once you're gone, you can never come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black.
The king is gone but he's not forgotten
This is the story of a Johnny Rotten
It's better to burn out than it is to rust
The king is gone but he's not forgotten.
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die
There's more to the picture
Than meets the eye.
Hey hey, my my.
Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist ... went from watching his infant daughter die to literally reincarnating animals.
I think they meant literally reanimating animals, but if I'm wrong, this guy's experiments would be interesting indeed.
Rather, this appears to be suspended animation, which frankly I find more interesting anyway. While you're suspended, you're clinically "dead," which is a state we can already induce with various toxins (supposedly, with intense meditation, yogis can do this as well).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
... with Alt-Ctrl-Del.
Have gnu, will travel.
Most every space science fiction has a period where people went out in "sleeper ships" to colonize the galaxy.. and then the warp drives come along and overtake the sleeper ships. It's a common theme.
I imagine the following for us:
* All those exoplanet astronomers eventually discover a rocky planet around an nearby star.. say, 20 light years away.
* They manage to confirm the atmosphere is oxygen/nitrogen, and can guess that the atmospheric pressure is similar to Earth.
* Some smart cookie figures out how to image the surface of the planet and sees trees and rivers and, ya know, squirrels.
* A Von Braun figure declares that we *must* go populate this planet and puts together enough international funding to send a ship.
The ship would be nuclear powered. It would have about 30,000 people on it in suspended animation. 30 engineers would remain awake to monitor the systems and keep the ship on course. After 10 years of service, they'd go into suspended animation and wake their successors (actually, it'd be staggered replacement). If it takes 400 years to get there, so what? That's just 40 shifts. 1,200 engineers out of 30,000 colonists.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Just pining for the fjords.
However bring back mice from a cryogenic state is different from a human. Also if anything that hasn't been preserved problem will be difficult to "deanimate" since all living things will start to decompose after you die so "deanimating" those will be near impossible since all the parts will be disintegrating.
Maybe he can try it on Ted Williams next...
If this doesn't get tagged "itsnolupus", I'm leaving.
1,200 engineers out of 30,000 colonists.
Not on 'B' Ark
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
has anyone seen pet cemetery...
You're either dead or you're not.
Define death.
As the cryonicists say, "Death is not a state. It's a prognosis." It's a claim that the organism will not be restored from its current state to a level of function that is considered alive.
Last time I looked (which was a while ago) trauma centers were regularly reviving victims who drowned in cold water and had been "dead" for half an hour. Surgeons were taking advantage of this by precooling patients who needed surgery that would leave the brain without blood flow for similar times. And research labs had perfused a dog with suitable protective substances, stopped its heart, cooled its body to freezing temperatures, left it that way for some time, then revived it. (And this guy has improved on that using H2S.)
Were the drowning victims "dead"? Was the dog?
There are people who are long since frozen - in full body or brain only - in the hope that they can some day be repaired (or built into a fresh body). If that is successful, are those people now "dead"? Or are they just resting at liquid nitrogen temperatures?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
While this story was interesting, I felt like I was reading an 8th grader's essay.
... warp / hyper drives are better.
If you can send information faster than light as viewed from any slower-than-light reference frame, and relativity holds, you can use multiple hops to send it back into the light-cone of its own past, i.e. send messages back in time.
("Sending information" includes writing it down and sending the letter. Never underestimate the bandwidth of an FTL spaceship full of mag tapes.)
This breaks causality.
So if relativity and causality both hold, no faster-than-light drive for us.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not only was it long and full of boring digressions, it reads like it was written by Slater from Dazed and Confused.
I know this is slashdot and all, but did anyone actually read the article? It is pretty fascinating what this guy is doing. This is real science, the standard crap is frequently little more than research. If this process works then it could mean a tremendous shift in medical practices. The impact that this could have on surgery, especially for high risk operations is incredible. The effects on battlefield medicine would be profound as well. Military medicine over the centuries has brought some pretty impressive things in terms of trauma care.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
It's not nsfw, but it is... poor.
http://dagobah.biz/flash/reanimator2.swf
If you can send information faster than light as viewed from any slower-than-light reference frame, and relativity holds, you can use multiple hops to send it back into the light-cone of its own past, i.e. send messages back in time.
I must be dumb. How? Can you break it down for us?
1. Travel to Mars faster than 4 minutes, say X.
2. Travel back to Earth faster than 4 minutes, so now 2*X.
3. Ok, so now it's S+2*X at Earth, how did you travel back in time?
How we know is more important than what we know.
we can finally unfreeze Walt Disney, and bring Elvis back to life. Maybe we could bring back George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to advise Barrack Obama? :)
Ah for the good old days when only Jesus could raise the dead.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Could we please imagine the overpopulation problem being solved by revolutions in space travel technology instead of mass starvation? Thanks.
whats in your head, in your head....
Greetings Earthling - I see you are trying to spread FUD
We don't have crows here in Fairbanks Alaska, they're called "Ravens". They're bigger, smarter, and more annoying. To the Native Athebascans, one of 'em created the world, and then became a right asshole to everyone around him, that was before the Burreau of Indian Affairs took over and did his job for him.
Oh, and that was a fucking terrible article. Good content... when I could find it. That could have been about 3 paragraphs, but the writer decided to try and make his mark by writing about 8 pages of self-indulgent bullshit first. I understand that it was supposed to be vaguely in the style of Hunter S Thompson... but that's irrelivant. The author made up all that shit about a connection between Roth and gonzo journalism, it was just a stupid excuse to try and write in gonzo style. I want to drop kick the author in the nutsack.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
What interests me here is his claim that we don't know much about life. And I guess there's a large element of truth here.
If you take a person who has just died, and look at any one of their billions of cells, you will find that they are ALL still "alive"; consuming oxygen, things moving around in them; proteins being formed... until the oxygen runs out.
So, you are in the curious state of being dead, while almost all of your cells are still clinically alive. It's quite fascinating really.
From these facts, we can reliable assert that human life is not dependent on cellular activity. There is a lot more to it than that.
Additionally, we now know that resuscitating humans who are "dead" (cold water near drowning, heart attack etc.) re-introduces oxygen, and it's the ocygen which actually kills you.
At what point does oxygen become the thing which kills you during a resus' event?
Are there ways to "immunize" a "dead" person so that re-animation is possible without brain death or cellular suicide due to rapid infusion of O2?
If we learn to re-animate people by immunizing them prior to resus', at what point after traditional "death" is a body no longer able to be revived? What does that say about the "time of death" or even how to declare someone "dead"?
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I tried to suspend my inner critic, but that writing style is unreadable. I didn't even get halfway through.
The speed of light is not some magical, mystical value that can never be touched. Light is just a waveform of photons. You can slow it down and you can speed it up. Both have already been done, and when it gets sped up it does actually arrive before it leaves. One must try to avoid conflating the confusing and improbable with the impossible.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Are we talking Suspend or Hibernation? Windows got it backwards then?
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
He's frozen. And once we find the cure for cancer we're gonna thaw him out and he's gonna be PISSED!
You know how pissed off he's gonna be? Ever taken a cold shower? Multiply that by fifteen million times, that's how pissed off the Duke's gonna be.
The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism."
In HT's case, that usually meant doing a lot of drugs and then babbling like an idiot. Junod appears to have skipped the drugs part, which may explain his total lack of actual useful insights.
Relativity and time dilation.
Well, I'm quite glad they adapted SF drive tech to accomodate TV ads, not the other way around. We don't need 50-year long ads while the generational starship is in transit...
So I guess that's a no.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?
"Can I buy some pot from you?"
As per my comment further up, none of your examples are a problem if we adopt "no further possibility of life" as our definition of death.
- drowning victims who are revived: were never dead
- drowning victims who are not revived: dead
- surgery patients: were never dead
- dog: never dead
- cryogenically frozen people: probably dead, but we should probably be careful in case they are not
Read Pynchon.
Yea, unfortunately it isn't anything as simple as taking the time traveled and just multiplying it by two.
Basically what relativity tells us is that time is relative, so the time you spend going to Mars and back at the speed of light or faster is actually a different amount of time than is observed on Earth.
You can read up on it here or here a bit.
Hey, am I the only one who's, like, put off by the conversational tone of the article? I mean, c'mon! - is it really that important to dumb down the presentation of a really smart guy? I don't know about you, but for me this pidgin-hipster is so yesterday. Can you say patronizing? Can you say gork English? Hemingway would be proud. And so on.
As an EMT volunteer we're told that a person isn't dead until they're warm and dead. Many people have been declared cold and dead, stored in the morgue, then scared the living crap out of the attendant complaining that it's bloody cold in there!
Vik :v)
Dude, I'm well aware of time dilation. I just don't see how you can turn time dilation into sending messages back in time. Please make your fucking argument already. Or were you just talking out your ass?
How we know is more important than what we know.
My 6 week old son was frozen for a few months as a part of an IVF cycle. Admitadly, he was only a blastocyst (about 100 cells) at the time, but he's very much alive now.
Unexpect the expected!
I must be dumb. How? Can you break it down for us?
1. Travel to Mars faster than 4 minutes, say X.
2. Travel back to Earth faster than 4 minutes, so now 2*X.
3. Ok, so now it's S+2*X at Earth, how did you travel back in time?
was an over simplification, and that time doesn't really act as one would expect it to (or at least not how I would)
As for why faster than light means back in time, well, my understanding of special relativity is not very deep, but from what I gather, moving faster than light means that an inertial reference frame can exist where time is moving backwards. (This comes from time dilation)
And then, since special relativity states that physics is the same for all reference frames, then if something can move back in time in one reference frame, it can move back in all reference frames.
The movie that movie got that from has a remake coming out in December, and it doesn't have any "Plan 9" overtones whatsoever.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The whole point of warp drive is that you're not traveling faster than light. You're getting from A to B faster than light would travel to go from A to B but you're not *moving* faster than light, you're warping space. This, of course, is impossible.. but that's not the point.
Wormholes are easier to understand. You connect two points in space.. now the distance required to travel is very short (it's zero if the wormhole has no "inside"). Did you travel faster than the speed of light? Why, yes, you traveled from A to B faster than light could before the wormhole was opened, but no, you didn't change your velocity to a value higher than c.
If you have an inside to your wormhole then you could go inside it, then change one of the end points to be somewhere else. Say you can only create a wormhole where the two end points are millimeters apart, but the inside of the wormhole is many meters, enough to fit all the equipment you need to manipulate the wormhole. Now you can move the A end of the wormhole so that it is closer to the B end, then move the B end so it is further away from the A end, then move the A end again. You're inch worming your way through space.. if you can inch fast enough, you can inch faster than light can travel the same distance. Are you moving faster than light? No, you're not moving at all! This is Peter F. Hamilton's "continuous wormhole drive".
All of these things require new physics.. there's a couple of proposals that require only slightly exotic absurdities, but it's all theoretical and, comical, right now.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sci-fi author Alistair Reynolds explored the concept of emergency euthanasia as a medical procedure in his novel "Pushing Ice". For deep space missions, casualties beyond the facilities of the ship to manage would be suffused with H2S to displace the oxygen before it could start damaging tissues.
Granted; in the story there was unspecified nano-based medicine to facilitate the revival, but the basic idea is there.
under construction
Ahhh, I thought from your original post you were talking about more conventional methods (well, if you can ever call FTL travel conventional...) of traveling. :)
I retract my previous statements, sorry doubting you
</discussion>
So much worthless information in that article resulting from the author trying to be cool. It hurt to wade through TFA looking for relevant information. I hope the author gets AIDS.
Wormholes are easier to understand. You connect two points in space.. now the distance required to travel is very short (it's zero if the wormhole has no "inside"). Did you travel faster than the speed of light? Why, yes,
Except that EPR wormholes aren't big enough to fit anything inside. We don't know of anything yet that would allow a big wormhole to exist.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Cool, I wonder if they're using this effect to build better lasers.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do you think if you were frozen now, you'd have trouble being resurrected in 2028? I think not. You'd love it.
Humans are like that: adaptable.
It would be interesting if a cottage industry somehow popped up around this idea. Don't like your friends/family/life? Have the money for something new? Have yourself deanimated now and reanimated at a future point of time of your choosing! Services will be made available to ease the transition to your new life!
I'm sure some writer has thought of this at some point. The big issue would be if you didn't like where you are and wanted to go back (oops).
Let's see...
Note to self: Prepare for Zombie Apocalypse
This guy looks like that austrian guy, Fritz, who rapped his daughter...hmmm, I see a pattern here.
Fritz: http://blogs.kansascity.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/11/fritz.jpg
Mad scientist (Mark Roth) : http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/1g/mark-roth-mad-scientist-1208-lg.jpg
Coincidence I THINK NOT!!
The lunatic is in my head
However, some people have been looking into cell death from lack of oxygen, and it looks like the rate of cell death is quite low until oxygen re-enters the system, at which point it spikes up.
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/apr07/resuscitation-center.html
This article also seems salient: Severe heart attack damage limited by hydrogen sulfide
That last one seems like a problem to me.
Paradox
I work at a high school - we have a really cool science teacher and on one wall of his classroom in large letters is the phrase:
"What is Nature trying to tell us"
What a great thing to have kids think about while doing science ..
Its not the years, its the mileage
"Thomas Donaldson has argued that "death" based on cardiac arrest or resuscitation failure is a purely social construction used to justify terminating care of dying patients. In this view, legal death and its aftermath are a form of euthanasia in which sick people are abandoned."
Oh, and read up on Information theoretical death
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
A doctor in Florida (I think) is using somewhat similar effect by cooling patients with life threatening medical problems (etc. heart attack). Basically he is trying to slow biological functioning to minimum level for a longer period of time, which prevents the dangerous medical condition to progress fast and kill the patient. This state of the edge of death gives the body chance to heal naturally. This doctor learned about this method in Russia, where in Siberia people have been using "icing" sick patients as a traditional medicine for a long time.
Not exactly... What HST called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism" was his article/book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (So imagine my disappointment when I read Junod's piece.)
Tom Junod's article does not qualify as gonzo journalism in any aspect. For example, he does not write from a subjective viewpoint, nor include himself in the story, nor describe the events as if he were experiencing them, nor include any possible fictional elements. He just uses an irritatingly informal and sophomoric tone.
If you must (mis)use the word gonzo, at least don't disparage HST's work by comparing it to this garbage.
If you suspend yourself for more than six months a year in, lets say, isle of man, would you be able to evade tax?
Huge profits to be made!
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
I'm a programmer, not even a hobbyist in physics, but I'll take a stab at that.
So, Time Dilation. Let's say that we've got the other end of our shiny new instantaneous teleporter on a space ship, moving away from Earth at a significant fraction of the speed of light, so much so that there's 2:1 time dilation being observed on both ends. (The same thing works with lesser relative motion, and non-instantaneous FTL, but this makes it clearer.)
The spaceship has been travelling for 10 years already, haveing left Earth at a point we'll call year 0.
From the spaceship's point of view, it's year 10 for them, and year 5 on Earth.
From Earth's point of view, it's year 10 for them, and year 5 on the Spaceship.
You've volunteered to be the guinea pig. So you hop in the instant transporter on Earth, and get teleported, it being 'instant' from Earth's frame of reference. Which means that it was year 10 on Earth when you left, and you arrive in the spaceship in their local year 5.
You shake hands all around, get congratulated on your bravery, then hop back in for the return trip. You are instantly teleported back, this time in the reference frame of the spaceship. You leave the spaceship still in their local year 5, and arrive on Earth at local year 2.5, 7.5 years before you left.
There are all sorts of problems with this scenario, of course (like hos to define 'instant' in relative frames)... and the solution to all of them is to realize you can't move faster than the speed of light.
The speed of light is not some magical, mystical value that can never be touched.
You are confusing the actual speed of actual light with a fundamental cosmological constant usually colloquially named "the speed of light" (shorthand of "the phase velocity of light in vacuum").
The link you posted is about experiment which employs group velocity of a wave packet. Group velocity is known to be arbitrarily fast but it bears no information - information must be sent in advance prior to its occurrence, like the tracks to be laid down before the train passes (only this train has no option to go or not to go).
Umbrella Corporation comes to mind
Something would go wrong, and at the end there would only be one survivor making it into the sequel.
Every creature dies as soon as it possibly can, to increase the generation rate and speed of evolution.
Way I see it, this still applies. Get rid of the old blood and bring in fresh generations. Filling the world with immortals will cause total stagnation.
I lost my sig.
This reminds me of something...
"And this distilled liquor drink thou off When presently through all thy veins shall run A cold and drowsy humour for no pulse Shall keep his native progress but surcease No warmth no breath shall testify thou livst The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade To pale ashes thy eyes windows fall Like death when he shuts up the day of life Each part deprived of supple government Shall stiff and stark and cold appear like death And in this borrow d likeness of shrunk death Thou shalt continue two and forty hours And then awake as from a pleasant sleep" - Friar Lawrence, Romeo & Juliet, By William Shakespeare
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Great story but this "writer" makes me want to punch my computer screen. PAINFUL.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
-- Rimmer
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
TZ
...no, no I don't, actually. Not this time.
The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
[a man puts a body on the cart]
Large Man with Dead Body: Here's one.
The Dead Collector: That'll be ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There's your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not.
The Dead Collector: He isn't.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
The Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, don't be such a baby.
The Dead Collector: I can't take him.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I feel fine.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can't.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
The Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, when's your next round?
The Dead Collector: Thursday.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I think I'll go for a walk.
Large Man with Dead Body: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I feel happy. I feel happy.
[the Dead Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Body with his a whack of his club]
Large Man with Dead Body: Ah, thank you very much.
The Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Large Man with Dead Body: Right.
Do you think if you were frozen now, you'd have trouble being resurrected in 2028? I think not. You'd love it.
Humans are like that: adaptable.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say you could resurrect an ancient Sumerian person with little or no difficulties.
You might want to read about Ishi, the last of the Yahi, before you leap to that conclusion.
You could at least get it right:
Klaatu barada nikto
And in case some of you didn't know:
Klaatu Barada Nikto
Karma: NaN
I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
But when people say, "the speed of light", they're not really meaning what you're saying... they really mean "the speed that light travels in a vacuum with nothing else affecting it", also known as c. So, travelling faster than light is easy, if you slow light down, but that doesn't even begin to approach anything interesting and is just being an annoying pedant. Travelling faster than c is what is almost certainly impossible.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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Warping space is not impossible. In fact you are doing it right now. And so is the earth, and the moon, and the sun, and gosh, just about everything (everything with mass that is).
Am I the only one who is seeing some serious Resident Evil shit in this article?
Ikaria = Umbrella Corp.???
I have a bad feeling about this...
We DO not what life is. It is a complex, self-replicating pattern, that consumes energy. Short, sweet and to the point. Negates fire (not complex), allows Virus (most basic thing that people think might be life.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You could have been frozen in the 70's and been prepared for all of that by watching Star Trek.
Computers -- Kirk and Spock *spoke* to their computers. 99% of us still have to type. Hell, Spock even holds up 3.5 floppies on the show and refers to them as "tapes"
Cell Phones -- "Scotty beam me up" Kirk used a cell phone nearly every episode. Many models even flip open the same way and are the same exact size as the original communicator. Spock even had that wacky Bluetooth headset in his ear often.
In fact, if you were frozen in the 70's you'd be disappointed by the LACK OF PROGRESS. Where the frack are our flying cars, jetpacks, transporters, warp drive, colonies on Mars, and all that other crap we were supposed to have by the year 2000?
Sheesh!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I for one welcome our decayed overlords.
I like the throwback to self funded scientists. In the days where you could fail constantly in order to learn. Humans learn best from trial & error and making mistakes.
1. Travel to Mars faster than 4 minutes, say X.
2. Get your telescope and observe Earth, where Y has passed. Make sure you've traveled fast enough that Y > 2X.
3. Travel back to Earth faster than 4 minutes, so now 2X.
4. Tell everyone what you saw from (2X - Y) into the future.
5. Profit!!!!1 (sorry.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Crap, I meant Y - 2X in step 4... I should proofread before I submit :(
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
From your article:
If the side of the chamber facing the incoming wave is called the near side, and the other the far side, the sequence of events is something like the following. The incoming wave, its tail extending ahead of it, approaches the chamber. Before the incoming wave's peak gets to the near side of the chamber, a complete pulse is emitted from the far side, along with a backward wave inside the chamber that moves from the far to the near side.
That's a misrepresentation of what's actually happening. It's based on what visibly takes place, which depends on the speed of the light which transmits the events to your eyes.
The pulse isn't actually transmitted out the other side "before" it enters the near side; we simply see it being transmitted out the other side before we see it reach the near side.
The only way this could really be true would be if a two-way relay were set up with a mirror or repeater such that you get your reply before you transmit the signal, and that's impossible.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yeah, it is – but for amplifying, not speeding up, the light. I actually read (most of) that article... you should try it. ;)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
... i want to be around for the Linux-on-the-desktop-year !
I think you have a similar misconception of warp drive as the last guy. Warp drive doesn't result in lorenz contraction. Depending on your particular warp technology, your actual velocity is zero. Even so, your scenario doesn't work as observing earth with your telescope is not instantaneous.. your looking at earth as it was 4 minutes ago.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yeah, I realized that too late...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The pharmacy/convenience store?
Waking up around 2500 to a world where all water has been replaced with a sports drink, there are Costcos spanning dozens of square miles, and dust storms rage through city streets...and you better be scannable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel