To be fair, when Ken Thompson gave his Turing Award lecture, he didn't have access to Slashdot anonymous cowards to explain the errors in his reasoning. He did the best he could with what he had.
Are you proposing to pay people to do this sort of thing, instead of feeding and housing them in the prison system, where the prison-industrial complex can siphon off most of the money that goes toward their support?
When you talk about "thermal infrared", you're making assumptions about operating temperature. A computational system running on stellar material could radiate thermally well above our visible bands.
I'm sorry that you misinterpreted my post as a "scientific argument", rather than snark.
It seems to me conceivable that the conditions within a star might support high-speed, highly dense computation. I propose no details of the implementation, nor any way to demonstrate or falsify the conjecture. But if it is happening, it may well be that we wouldn't observe it as anything different from the stellar behavior we already do observe. Heck, it could be happening eight light-minutes away from us.
I think this supposition is no more silly than one scaling our current "industrial" "civilization" to something that spans a galaxy.
The firmament is peppered with huge concentrations of high-density plasma, supporting computation and communication far beyond the capacity of low-temperature, low-energy, solid-state matter. The byproducts of all that computation and communication look to us like thermal and optical noise because, being advanced, the minds running on them do so efficiently. Why leak information out into the vast, cold universe before you've taken full advantage of your substrate's Shannon capacity?
But, no, you're probably right. If there are other civilizations out there, why aren't we seeing the smoke from their cook-fires?
One aspect of the Fermi Paradox is the assumption that "civilization as we know it" necessarily broadcasts a huge amount of information-bearing electromagnetic radiation, and that more advanced civilizations will broadcast more. From a modern perspective, this seems silly.
A signal recognizable across interstellar distances represents waste. It's energy that's spent without reaching its intended target. One aspect of "advancement" is reducing this waste -- improving modulation schemes, encoding efficiencies, and transmission techniques to minimize wasted power.
A signal recognizable across interstellar distances also represents lack of diversity, or wasted capacity. If you're using a certain chunk of spectrum to broadcast a signal recognizable across light-years, you're not getting as much capacity out of that chunk as you could by using it for a bunch of geographically localized broadcasts -- for example, by broadcasting separate programs to each of 100 individual square miles within a 10-mile square, rather than one program for the entire 100-square-mile area. Take this idea a bit further, and you see our current cellular networks. From space, their signals would sound like noise.
It seems to me that the natural signal of a civilization like ours is a pulse of EM broadcast, lasting perhaps a few decades, then going silent or becoming indistinguishable from noise as we move to more localized and more efficiently encoded transmissions. If nobody happens to be listening in our direction during the right interval, brief compared to technological civilization's lifespan, they could easily miss us completely.
The brain isn't just software, its hardware is inherently part of the program.Destroy the hardware, destroy the program. Even if you made a backup that program is gone. I can buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, but it would be silly to say the other computer IS this one, whether or not I destroy this one.
First, this is no argument against piecemeal incremental substitution (see the previous replies to your post). Piecemeal substitution is already happening, all the time, as your body undergoes its normal metabolic processes. In fact, to the extent that consciousness emerges from patterns of activity rather than physical structure -- that "you" comprise the oscillations racing around your brain, rather than just the wiring diagrams of your nervous system -- one could argue that "you" already are being replaced/regenerated several times each second.
More to the point, though, if I buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, I don't care whether the new computer "is" the old one. It does the same things, responds in the same ways, has the same state (memories). If it could "think", it would "think" it was still the same individual, albeit with its old infirmities healed, er, hardware flaws repaired. My old registered copy of Photoshop still remembers my preferences and behaves the same way, even though it now runs in emulation on an alien architecture; the only difference is that it's much faster, and it didn't stop running when its original hardware platform went extinct.
I don't see this as a return to a narrow and stubborn behaviorist approach. Behaviorism focused on externally observable stimulus and response, and denied the significance of any internal or non-observable state. If you want to define "internal state" as whatever is left after you've mapped every neural connection, modeled every neuron's behavior, faithfully recorded and emulated every activation pattern -- well, okay, but "consciousness of the gaps" doesn't impress me. Maybe that makes me a neo-behaviorist, but I think it just means that I'm not a Cartesian dualist. If there's an immaterial soul with its metaphysical hands on the controls of my corporeal self, well, the possible hiding places for that cockpit seem to be getting mighty small and thinly spread.
I've made my peace with personal mortality, but if I were offered a convincing chance to have my state vector preserved and potentially restored, I'd give it some serious consideration. One life should be enough, but I'm enjoying this one enough to see the value in continuing it or following it up.
Why? Delta-V is not acceleration. If you want to change your velocity by 10km/s, you can do it by accelerating at 10m/s/s for 1000 s, or by 10km/s/s for 1 s, or by 10000km/s/s for 1ms.
That would be great, but based on the papers I've seen (here, for example), "1% platinum" is high by at least two orders of magnitude -- that would be 10000 ppm; actual estimates are closer to 100 ppm, and that's for the very richest of precious-metal-rich asteroids. Am I missing more recent analyses?
...can you at least give me a link to an "About" page? Maybe a paragraph talking about what you're expecting to do? It's a beautiful content-free single-page website, but come on, throw us a bone here.
Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there.
Slashdot Mirror
Water saturated with perchlorates? No, I would not want to be that first human.
...to show everyone that you're a hack writer.
To be fair, when Ken Thompson gave his Turing Award lecture, he didn't have access to Slashdot anonymous cowards to explain the errors in his reasoning. He did the best he could with what he had.
Thirty-one years later, it's still worth reflecting on it.
Apparently I've been neglecting Chrome on this old image for quite a long time. Chrome 21, Mac OS 10.6.8. No crash observed.
Are you proposing to pay people to do this sort of thing, instead of feeding and housing them in the prison system, where the prison-industrial complex can siphon off most of the money that goes toward their support?
That's just crazy talk.
When you talk about "thermal infrared", you're making assumptions about operating temperature. A computational system running on stellar material could radiate thermally well above our visible bands.
I'm sorry that you misinterpreted my post as a "scientific argument", rather than snark.
It seems to me conceivable that the conditions within a star might support high-speed, highly dense computation. I propose no details of the implementation, nor any way to demonstrate or falsify the conjecture. But if it is happening, it may well be that we wouldn't observe it as anything different from the stellar behavior we already do observe. Heck, it could be happening eight light-minutes away from us.
I think this supposition is no more silly than one scaling our current "industrial" "civilization" to something that spans a galaxy.
The firmament is peppered with huge concentrations of high-density plasma, supporting computation and communication far beyond the capacity of low-temperature, low-energy, solid-state matter. The byproducts of all that computation and communication look to us like thermal and optical noise because, being advanced, the minds running on them do so efficiently. Why leak information out into the vast, cold universe before you've taken full advantage of your substrate's Shannon capacity?
But, no, you're probably right. If there are other civilizations out there, why aren't we seeing the smoke from their cook-fires?
If only the Phone Cops had been able to call in the Phone Firemen...
I'm detecting a certain sameness to the stuff that theodp has been posting. Anyone else notice it?
One aspect of the Fermi Paradox is the assumption that "civilization as we know it" necessarily broadcasts a huge amount of information-bearing electromagnetic radiation, and that more advanced civilizations will broadcast more. From a modern perspective, this seems silly.
A signal recognizable across interstellar distances represents waste. It's energy that's spent without reaching its intended target. One aspect of "advancement" is reducing this waste -- improving modulation schemes, encoding efficiencies, and transmission techniques to minimize wasted power.
A signal recognizable across interstellar distances also represents lack of diversity, or wasted capacity. If you're using a certain chunk of spectrum to broadcast a signal recognizable across light-years, you're not getting as much capacity out of that chunk as you could by using it for a bunch of geographically localized broadcasts -- for example, by broadcasting separate programs to each of 100 individual square miles within a 10-mile square, rather than one program for the entire 100-square-mile area. Take this idea a bit further, and you see our current cellular networks. From space, their signals would sound like noise.
It seems to me that the natural signal of a civilization like ours is a pulse of EM broadcast, lasting perhaps a few decades, then going silent or becoming indistinguishable from noise as we move to more localized and more efficiently encoded transmissions. If nobody happens to be listening in our direction during the right interval, brief compared to technological civilization's lifespan, they could easily miss us completely.
How would an existing species gain nourishment from another situated at interstellar distances?
Bad metaphor, I think.
The brain isn't just software, its hardware is inherently part of the program.Destroy the hardware, destroy the program. Even if you made a backup that program is gone. I can buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, but it would be silly to say the other computer IS this one, whether or not I destroy this one.
First, this is no argument against piecemeal incremental substitution (see the previous replies to your post). Piecemeal substitution is already happening, all the time, as your body undergoes its normal metabolic processes. In fact, to the extent that consciousness emerges from patterns of activity rather than physical structure -- that "you" comprise the oscillations racing around your brain, rather than just the wiring diagrams of your nervous system -- one could argue that "you" already are being replaced/regenerated several times each second.
More to the point, though, if I buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, I don't care whether the new computer "is" the old one. It does the same things, responds in the same ways, has the same state (memories). If it could "think", it would "think" it was still the same individual, albeit with its old infirmities healed, er, hardware flaws repaired. My old registered copy of Photoshop still remembers my preferences and behaves the same way, even though it now runs in emulation on an alien architecture; the only difference is that it's much faster, and it didn't stop running when its original hardware platform went extinct.
I don't see this as a return to a narrow and stubborn behaviorist approach. Behaviorism focused on externally observable stimulus and response, and denied the significance of any internal or non-observable state. If you want to define "internal state" as whatever is left after you've mapped every neural connection, modeled every neuron's behavior, faithfully recorded and emulated every activation pattern -- well, okay, but "consciousness of the gaps" doesn't impress me. Maybe that makes me a neo-behaviorist, but I think it just means that I'm not a Cartesian dualist. If there's an immaterial soul with its metaphysical hands on the controls of my corporeal self, well, the possible hiding places for that cockpit seem to be getting mighty small and thinly spread.
I've made my peace with personal mortality, but if I were offered a convincing chance to have my state vector preserved and potentially restored, I'd give it some serious consideration. One life should be enough, but I'm enjoying this one enough to see the value in continuing it or following it up.
But I was all set to sign up as a brain donor!
I forget which conference is being co-hosted this year -- is it O RLY or Srsly? Do I get a discount if I also register for "Yeah I Went There"?
Why? Delta-V is not acceleration. If you want to change your velocity by 10km/s, you can do it by accelerating at 10m/s/s for 1000 s, or by 10km/s/s for 1 s, or by 10000km/s/s for 1ms.
Your region doesn't get math education subsidies, either, does it?
Sounds like Christie was inspired by last week's news from Austria.
Like so very many problems, this one becomes much simpler once you stop thinking of "them" as people.
That would be great, but based on the papers I've seen (here, for example), "1% platinum" is high by at least two orders of magnitude -- that would be 10000 ppm; actual estimates are closer to 100 ppm, and that's for the very richest of precious-metal-rich asteroids. Am I missing more recent analyses?
...can you at least give me a link to an "About" page? Maybe a paragraph talking about what you're expecting to do? It's a beautiful content-free single-page website, but come on, throw us a bone here.
Say what you want, but at least Lennart doesn't post to the wrong thread.
I have double-blind sensitivity syndrome, you insensitive clod!
Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there.
Spores are patient.
Yeah, but the Cray 1 was 40 years ago, not 15.
In other news, I'm apparently old.