there is a degree of similarity between the different types of hardware [existing today] that probably won't exist between todays computers and those available a hundred years from today, much less two.
The hardware will probably be very different as you say. We'll probably be using molecular logic gates and some sort of nanotube-based memory. But how will it appear to be organized from the programmer's (and therefore the software's) point of view? It's true that the history of computing isn't very old, but we got where we are today by a huge investment of money and thinking, spanning vastly different hardware platforms. There are C compilers for Pentium 4s and G5s, and also for 8080s and 6502s, and they use essentially the same input language. I think that's because all those programming language flame wars have been dealing with real (timeless?) issues.
One day when we've maxed out Moore's Law, it will stop making economic sense to build a single-CPU computer. If there's a deep change in how software engineering is done, it will probably be around the issues of running a program over several CPUs. (Obviously, just MHO.)
Lots of software includes or utilizes standardized hardware abstraction layers. Think about the POSIX standard, or the virtual machines for Java or Python or Common Lisp. These abstraction layers mean that large amounts of code are portable (sometimes with some effort, sometimes with none) across any hardware platform that supports the abstraction layer.
Hardware manufacturers will always have a powerful incentive to support the abstraction layer, because by doing so, they'll instantly pick up a huge set of killer apps for their new CPUs. Standardized abstraction layers therefore provide an economically efficient way to divide the labor of porting software to new platforms.
Are you thinking that in order to have software that's useful in the long term, it must run continuously on exactly the same piece of hardware? Think about Google (a very useful thing in our society). They must be bringing newer, faster computers on-line all the time. But if they're not total boneheads, they don't need to rewrite all their code to do this.
The first thing I thought was that I can carry around one of those keychain flash memories. But you don't know what icky schmootz is on the keyboard, or if there's a keystroke logger in the terminal, or if the terminal is set up to trash your keychain memory. There is more than a question of data storage here.
You wouldn't trust a public terminal, but you could probably trust a public power supply so you don't need to carry around batteries. People already trust public wifi networks ala Starbucks. CPUs and memory can continue to shrink, but what about keyboards and screens?
Keyboards can be embedded in cloth which could be rolled up. Displays could be made to be rolled up also (1, 2, 3). People are working on non-volatile nanotube-based memories which could replace bulky, fragile hard disks. Cool, zero boot-up time.
It's pretty reasonable to imagine that in five or ten years there could be a cheap computer with the feel and durability of thick cloth, that rolls up to be about 6 inches long and maybe an inch wide. Maybe you velcro it around your forearm when not in use. I'd buy one.
I'm familiar with fluidics, thanks. It was all part of the joke. My brother, who's in mechanical engineering, tinkered with fluidics as an undergrad in the late 80s.
Pneumatic tubes have raised the bar for butlers and delivery boys everywhere. Who can run or bike as fast as compressed air? A system of slightly larger pneumatic tubes might obsolete taxicabs and city buses.
If a weak flow of air can be made to switch a stronger one's direction, or switch it on and off, we're ALL screwed. Elaborate networks of air currents, switching one another on and off, could be designed using Boole's rules of logic, and BAM you've got a machine that thinks. Give it two weeks and it will take away all our jobs.
Some may welcome our new pneumatic tube masters, but I say they 4r3 teh 3v1L and must be stopped! If you see a tube and you think there might be compressed air in it, try cutting it open. If anything besides air comes out, slap some duct tape on there real fast. But if only air comes out, you may have just allowed a family to eat dinner. If you're not sure it's air, examine the gas carefully with a lighter.
One thing a lot of people don't know: those DIGSAFE signs in your neighborhood are part of a vast conspiracy, providing the pneumatic tubes an unseen underground haven to raise their young. Get your shovel, seek them out, and hammer nails into them. (But keep a defibrillator handy.)
Of course we want to end up with the scenario where the fruits of automation and robotic labor benefit everybody in society. If automation acts only to widen the gap between rich and poor, that will be a bad thing.
One way to become a "have" rather than a "have-not" is to invest in the stock market. But that's risky and not everybody has access to it, and doing it on a scale that changes you from worker-bee to owner (in a significant way) is beyond the means of almost everybody.
As automation grows, I would hope to see something like the open source development model becoming an equalizer. In Brain's dystopian picture, the have-nots are the people who didn't buy robots, or didn't buy them soon enough to make a difference. It would be nice if robotic hardware became available early on in some kind of open-source-like or hobbyist-like venue.
If one accepts Brain's most dire predictions, that human labor will become valueless and only ownership (primarily of land) will mean anything, then maybe the lifestyle to shoot for is as a nomad who lives outdoors, and the kind of robot to build or buy is one that makes that possible and comfortable, maybe a hunter-gatherer-bot with a database of folk remedies and a knack for building outdoor shelters.
Marshall Brain, who did the How Stuff Works website, has given a lot of thought to this stuff, and written a short novel exploring a couple of possible scenarios. At the end of the novel, which is about the thorough automation of every possible job, there are three kinds of lifestyles available: some people live imprisoned and jobless in a welfare housing development, other people (who were already rich when the automation started) live luxurious cloistered lives in gated communities, and some people have chosen to put aside the pre-automation have-have-not distinctions so they live in a paradise where automation serves everybody equally. In the novel, the last group is isolated in Australia.
Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.
Cargo might be a good use of the thing. When I read about the thing a couple years ago, I got all excited and got a copy of Edwards' book. There are two big problems. One is that LEO is full of space junk flying around at 8 km/sec. Edwards' idea for that is to put the bottom of the elevator on a boat that tugs the elevator around horizontally to avoid the flying junk, and I see no reason why that wouldn't work, assuming you can track the junk well enough, and make the cable fault-tolerant/redundant. The other is that whatever or whoever rides the space elevator spends a week in the Van Allen belts, which are full of nasty radiation. That's probably fine for some materials (air, water) but we don't want that for people.
I have no problems with governments spending money on unprofitable ideas for the common good.
It's good that you feel that way. We have an election coming up. Viewed in economic terms, this is AFAIK the purpose of government.
I have a problem with them funding for-profit private companies to develop those unprofitable ideas.
Back when NASA was a real thing, all the hardware was built by private corporations. NASA took their budget and used corporations as a means to an end. The contract money was a way to twist market forces so that space hardware would get built. I gather from your response that you object to this bidding-and-contracting process that got us to the Moon. But it seems to work, and it's hard to imagine NASA (especially now) building space hardware without corporate help.
I could imagine that you might object to corporations trying to cut corners and compromising safety. They'd have an incentive to do that. NASA did a lot of oversight back in the day, cognizant of this possibility, and it seemed to mostly work. We lost a few lives but most astronauts came home safely.
I could also imagine that you object to the winning bidders gaining an unfair advantage in building space hardware, that un-levels the playing field when space becomes really profitable.
A good analogy is Craig Venter (Celera Genomics) and the Human Genome Project. In the mid-late 90s Celera did a lot of great work on fast DNA sequencing. They really moved the state of the art forward and we'll all benefit in the long term. In the short term, Venter fudged the significance of his work, claiming to have an "essentially" complete human genome 2 or 3 years early.
Did Venter stretch the truth? A little, you bet, and he had powerful incentives to do so (ego, press conferences, Celera's stock price). Does Celera (or whoever bought them in the meanwhile) now enjoy an unfair disadvantage in DNA sequencing? Yup, for the next 20 years they'll be getting fat on patent licensing fees for DNA sequencing hardware.
Are we better off or worse off overall as a result of all that? I think we're better off. Somebody was going to patent the stuff, and the patents do run out in 20 years. Venter's stretching of the truth may have been convolutedly causal in some number of human deaths (as are daily decisions made about testing and releasing new pharmaceuticals) but I think that's just the irreparable unfairness of life in a complex society. I don't know that it would ever be practical to track those causal links and assign the correct fraction of influence to the many factors involved.
So I've done a lot of guessing about what you might perceive as the costs to society of corporate involvement in public projects, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I'm fully in favour of private space research--but having NASA give money away makes it "publicly funded private enterprise." In other words, companies are spending tax money on personal profit.
I have read a few microeconomics books and I have some glimmer of how this stuff works. The reason we have a government and taxes is because there are things we want that the free market can't/won't provide. We use government and taxes to make conciously-designed adjustments to the economy to accomplish the things that aren't going to happen anyway.
People whine incessantly about spending money on national defense, but if it were left to the private sector, we'd be screwed because every corporation would let everybody else take care of it. So the government diverts a fraction of our GNP to finance the military. The economic term for this is that national defense is a "public good".
Space research, until it's really profitable, is also a public good. It's not profitable yet. If it were, then corporations would be doing it already, without the X Prize and without NASA. The closest thing we've got is that corporations put commsats in orbit. No manned flights, nothing beyond LEO, because none of that stuff is profitable yet.
Eventually it will be profitable, and at that time you'll be right, it will be inappropriate to spend public money to incentivize something that will happen anyway. But we're not there yet. We still need to tweak the market incentives to get corporations to work on this stuff.
Whatever happened to ESR saying he wasn't going to let his new found wealth go to his head.
I think what's gone to his head is the fame, more than the money. And he's so openly contemptuous of the people whose admiration are the basis of his fame. It's like some kind of Hollywood thing.
What a pompous ass.
Ever been in the same room with him? "Pompous ass" incarnate. I once talked to a computer bookstore owner who had him scheduled for a signing. He just wanted to play with his laptop, get the signatures over asap, and have as little human interaction as possible. Which was probably a kindness for the humans who were present, though they went home disappointed, and that bookstore will never book him again.
When biology makes stuff, it needs to make it with protein, which isn't a very stiff/sturdy material. So living things are soft and mushy (even Ahnold) compared to, say, building materials for skyscrapers or airplanes. Also, it's tough to build good computers out of biological materials, and without a couple billion years of evolution, we'd be as dumb as lettuce.
So if nanotech can make smarter artifacts out of stiffer materials than biology can, it's conceivable that nanotech could overrun biological life. IIRC, Drexler's original horror story was that the _entire_biosphere_ could be consumed; maybe if the experiment were really done, we might find some equilibrium where some biological life still existed.
It turns out that gray goo is a very tough engineering problem. Imagine building a car that could wander through the woods, foraging for fuel. The energy density in the woods is very low on average, and the car is unlikely to find the energy it wants before it runs out of its previous fuel supply. The varieties of fuel-like things that it might find is staggering: maple sap, starchy vegetables growing wild, beehives with honey in them, dried wood, a half-empty gas can in some barn, or the energy in the food in a kitchen. If the wild car is to be a real analogy for gray goo, it must recognize each possible energy source and be able to use it. Hard problem.
Because it's such a hard problem, nobody will do it by accident, any more than somebody will "accidentally" land safely on Mars. Also, whatever you're trying to accomplish by making gray goo, there is almost certainly a simpler cheaper way to accomplish it. Want to wipe out humanity? Make an AIDS variant that's mosquito-borne. Or do the same with ebola or smallpox. A few people want to wipe out humanity, but far fewer people want to wipe out all plant and animal life on Earth.
The point of Drexler and Phoenix's recent work, and this probably isn't quite emphasized strongly enough in these recent commentaries, is that gray goo isn't even a very good manufacturing paradigm. Chris Phoenix has been thinking a lot recently about sensible
nanotech manufacturing strategies, and they look a lot more like SIMD vector processors. You have a broadcast instruction stream driving a bunch of individually stupid actuators. Duplicating the program store and instruction decoding for each actuator is wasteful, in terms of both material and reliability.
janitors, cafeteria staff, etc. had to have university degrees to mop floors or serve burgers.
Plenty of PhDs have been out of work in recent years. Offering a strange employment niche like that might not be so bad. We of lesser academic stature can sometimes have an advantage in a soft economy. Employers expect us to be more negotiable on salary, and sometimes being underemployed is better than being unemployed.
Slightly off-topic rant: Corporations are doing too much of this thing. Especially this free-trade globalization crap. Corporations need to be punished for losing or exporting American jobs, and rewarded when they create them or bring them back from overseas. (My wife was from Braidwood IL so it bugs me to see bad things happening to Illinois.)
I think we need a new variety of tax status for businesses, designed to provide employment first and profits second. Such a business could not be publicly owned or traded, so the SEC rule about prioritizing shareholder interest over employment wouldn't apply. It would get tax breaks in proportion to the number of U.S. citizens it employed. It would face tax liabilities for any work it contracted out, especially outside the U.S. There might be something about sweetening the tax incentives for jobs created in economically distressed parts of the country.
Reaching space? I think not. Some conjecture that such a thing could be accomplished with rockets, but this is clear fallacy: once outside the atmosphere, there is nothing for the rocket to push against.
Though IBM did not invent Linux, does not distribute it and earns nary a penny on it, the computer giant is spending billions in a crusade to make Linux the world's most popular operating system.
This may seem a surprising thing to do, but in fact it makes good sense to commoditize the products that complement your own. For IBM, a hardware vendor, that's the OS. For Microsoft, an OS vendor, that's hardware.
For the last twenty years, Microsoft has been extraordinarily successful in commoditizing PC hardware. This has not been good news for IBM (though most of IBM's problems over that time have more to do with a misperception of where the market was going). Now IBM is turning the tables on Microsoft by commoditizing Linux, which if successful, will drive down the price of Windows and make it more affordable to buy computer hardware.
The Moon-Mars thing is only the next five or ten years, isn't it? NASA would presumably want an insignia that extends beyond the immediate goal. At least I would, if I were NASA. Otherwise I'd worry about whether I should be getting my resume cleaned up.
"Fortune favors the bold", huh? So what favors the feeble? Whatever that is, NASA should be shopping for some of that.
Come on, Torvalds and McBride action figures? Does anybody not want these? Maybe a Stallman action figure to muddy the waters with periodic confusing rants.
Get everyone a nice very flat polished piece of metal (easy enough in those days).
It's easy enough to polish the metal, but I'm not sure about getting it flat enough. You want the reflection to stay together over a distance of maybe a half-mile or a mile, and you're doing this with, what, Bronze Age technology? I don't rule it out as a possibility, but if I were in Archimedes' position, I don't know how I'd get good enough flatness.
Assuming they could get the flatness, I guess the aiming wouldn't be that hard. The idea for each guy to wiggle his reflection on the beach could work just as well on the target, and might help with the blinding idea. It also occurs to me that it might be even more effective to ignite masts rather than sails. (Help for nautically challenged: Sail = big hunk of cloth, mast = thick wooden stick that holds it up)
The I heard it, he didn't use lenses, he used mirrors. He got the army to issue polished metal shields to all the soldiers, that could be used to cast shield-sized reflections onto the sails of approaching ships. If all the soldiers put their reflections on one spot on the sail, it would set the sail on fire.
I think you're right that this story is probably apocryphal. It's hard to imagine that good mirrors would have been inexpensive enough in those days to make this practical. It's also difficult to imagine how they got coordinated enough to get all the reflections onto one spot.
Ender's Game was great on its own... Speaker For the Dead... Xenocide, however sucked.
I read Ender's Game and SFtD a very long time ago, I remember liking both but never getting around to Xenocide. I'm glad I didn't miss much.
I crave closure to this story that has been the prevailing epic in my life.
Understandable. I feel the same way if I don't watch myself, and remembering "it's just a bunch of movies" is still a conscious effort.
One of these days I should get into the "Expanded Universe" stuff. Everything I've heard is that it delivers on the promise where the movies ran out of steam.
You're right. I was in high school in 1977 and I really enjoyed the first movie. I knew people who had Star Wars posters up in their rooms, and maybe even a few lunchboxes, but nobody was obsessed.
Lucas says he planned a series of movies all along but nobody believed it until Empire Strikes Back. Suddenly Star Wars seemed as deep as Star Trek. Together the two movies implied a much bigger background than the first one alone. We all started drinking the Joseph Campbell kool-aid.
Return of the Jedi did a nice job of continuing the mystique and mythology, but the sucky Ewoks started to make it easier to step back and think, hey, it's just a bunch of movies. Episodes 1 and 2 have completed that process.
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The hardware will probably be very different as you say. We'll probably be using molecular logic gates and some sort of nanotube-based memory. But how will it appear to be organized from the programmer's (and therefore the software's) point of view? It's true that the history of computing isn't very old, but we got where we are today by a huge investment of money and thinking, spanning vastly different hardware platforms. There are C compilers for Pentium 4s and G5s, and also for 8080s and 6502s, and they use essentially the same input language. I think that's because all those programming language flame wars have been dealing with real (timeless?) issues.
One day when we've maxed out Moore's Law, it will stop making economic sense to build a single-CPU computer. If there's a deep change in how software engineering is done, it will probably be around the issues of running a program over several CPUs. (Obviously, just MHO.)
Hardware manufacturers will always have a powerful incentive to support the abstraction layer, because by doing so, they'll instantly pick up a huge set of killer apps for their new CPUs. Standardized abstraction layers therefore provide an economically efficient way to divide the labor of porting software to new platforms.
Are you thinking that in order to have software that's useful in the long term, it must run continuously on exactly the same piece of hardware? Think about Google (a very useful thing in our society). They must be bringing newer, faster computers on-line all the time. But if they're not total boneheads, they don't need to rewrite all their code to do this.
Set the kind of post to "HTML Formatted", using the little menu in the lower right. Then wrap HTML markup around it:
<a href="http://www.foo.com/"> Text that you want highlighted </a>
Fractenna is actually a pretty interesting-looking link. Thanks.
You wouldn't trust a public terminal, but you could probably trust a public power supply so you don't need to carry around batteries. People already trust public wifi networks ala Starbucks. CPUs and memory can continue to shrink, but what about keyboards and screens?
Keyboards can be embedded in cloth which could be rolled up. Displays could be made to be rolled up also (1, 2, 3). People are working on non-volatile nanotube-based memories which could replace bulky, fragile hard disks. Cool, zero boot-up time.
It's pretty reasonable to imagine that in five or ten years there could be a cheap computer with the feel and durability of thick cloth, that rolls up to be about 6 inches long and maybe an inch wide. Maybe you velcro it around your forearm when not in use. I'd buy one.
I'm familiar with fluidics, thanks. It was all part of the joke. My brother, who's in mechanical engineering, tinkered with fluidics as an undergrad in the late 80s.
If a weak flow of air can be made to switch a stronger one's direction, or switch it on and off, we're ALL screwed. Elaborate networks of air currents, switching one another on and off, could be designed using Boole's rules of logic, and BAM you've got a machine that thinks. Give it two weeks and it will take away all our jobs.
Some may welcome our new pneumatic tube masters, but I say they 4r3 teh 3v1L and must be stopped! If you see a tube and you think there might be compressed air in it, try cutting it open. If anything besides air comes out, slap some duct tape on there real fast. But if only air comes out, you may have just allowed a family to eat dinner. If you're not sure it's air, examine the gas carefully with a lighter.
One thing a lot of people don't know: those DIGSAFE signs in your neighborhood are part of a vast conspiracy, providing the pneumatic tubes an unseen underground haven to raise their young. Get your shovel, seek them out, and hammer nails into them. (But keep a defibrillator handy.)
One way to become a "have" rather than a "have-not" is to invest in the stock market. But that's risky and not everybody has access to it, and doing it on a scale that changes you from worker-bee to owner (in a significant way) is beyond the means of almost everybody.
As automation grows, I would hope to see something like the open source development model becoming an equalizer. In Brain's dystopian picture, the have-nots are the people who didn't buy robots, or didn't buy them soon enough to make a difference. It would be nice if robotic hardware became available early on in some kind of open-source-like or hobbyist-like venue.
If one accepts Brain's most dire predictions, that human labor will become valueless and only ownership (primarily of land) will mean anything, then maybe the lifestyle to shoot for is as a nomad who lives outdoors, and the kind of robot to build or buy is one that makes that possible and comfortable, maybe a hunter-gatherer-bot with a database of folk remedies and a knack for building outdoor shelters.
Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.
Cargo might be a good use of the thing. When I read about the thing a couple years ago, I got all excited and got a copy of Edwards' book. There are two big problems. One is that LEO is full of space junk flying around at 8 km/sec. Edwards' idea for that is to put the bottom of the elevator on a boat that tugs the elevator around horizontally to avoid the flying junk, and I see no reason why that wouldn't work, assuming you can track the junk well enough, and make the cable fault-tolerant/redundant. The other is that whatever or whoever rides the space elevator spends a week in the Van Allen belts, which are full of nasty radiation. That's probably fine for some materials (air, water) but we don't want that for people.
It's good that you feel that way. We have an election coming up. Viewed in economic terms, this is AFAIK the purpose of government.
I have a problem with them funding for-profit private companies to develop those unprofitable ideas.
Back when NASA was a real thing, all the hardware was built by private corporations. NASA took their budget and used corporations as a means to an end. The contract money was a way to twist market forces so that space hardware would get built. I gather from your response that you object to this bidding-and-contracting process that got us to the Moon. But it seems to work, and it's hard to imagine NASA (especially now) building space hardware without corporate help.
I could imagine that you might object to corporations trying to cut corners and compromising safety. They'd have an incentive to do that. NASA did a lot of oversight back in the day, cognizant of this possibility, and it seemed to mostly work. We lost a few lives but most astronauts came home safely.
I could also imagine that you object to the winning bidders gaining an unfair advantage in building space hardware, that un-levels the playing field when space becomes really profitable.
A good analogy is Craig Venter (Celera Genomics) and the Human Genome Project. In the mid-late 90s Celera did a lot of great work on fast DNA sequencing. They really moved the state of the art forward and we'll all benefit in the long term. In the short term, Venter fudged the significance of his work, claiming to have an "essentially" complete human genome 2 or 3 years early.
Did Venter stretch the truth? A little, you bet, and he had powerful incentives to do so (ego, press conferences, Celera's stock price). Does Celera (or whoever bought them in the meanwhile) now enjoy an unfair disadvantage in DNA sequencing? Yup, for the next 20 years they'll be getting fat on patent licensing fees for DNA sequencing hardware.
Are we better off or worse off overall as a result of all that? I think we're better off. Somebody was going to patent the stuff, and the patents do run out in 20 years. Venter's stretching of the truth may have been convolutedly causal in some number of human deaths (as are daily decisions made about testing and releasing new pharmaceuticals) but I think that's just the irreparable unfairness of life in a complex society. I don't know that it would ever be practical to track those causal links and assign the correct fraction of influence to the many factors involved.
So I've done a lot of guessing about what you might perceive as the costs to society of corporate involvement in public projects, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I have read a few microeconomics books and I have some glimmer of how this stuff works. The reason we have a government and taxes is because there are things we want that the free market can't/won't provide. We use government and taxes to make conciously-designed adjustments to the economy to accomplish the things that aren't going to happen anyway.
People whine incessantly about spending money on national defense, but if it were left to the private sector, we'd be screwed because every corporation would let everybody else take care of it. So the government diverts a fraction of our GNP to finance the military. The economic term for this is that national defense is a "public good".
Space research, until it's really profitable, is also a public good. It's not profitable yet. If it were, then corporations would be doing it already, without the X Prize and without NASA. The closest thing we've got is that corporations put commsats in orbit. No manned flights, nothing beyond LEO, because none of that stuff is profitable yet.
Eventually it will be profitable, and at that time you'll be right, it will be inappropriate to spend public money to incentivize something that will happen anyway. But we're not there yet. We still need to tweak the market incentives to get corporations to work on this stuff.
I think what's gone to his head is the fame, more than the money. And he's so openly contemptuous of the people whose admiration are the basis of his fame. It's like some kind of Hollywood thing.
What a pompous ass.
Ever been in the same room with him? "Pompous ass" incarnate. I once talked to a computer bookstore owner who had him scheduled for a signing. He just wanted to play with his laptop, get the signatures over asap, and have as little human interaction as possible. Which was probably a kindness for the humans who were present, though they went home disappointed, and that bookstore will never book him again.
When biology makes stuff, it needs to make it with protein, which isn't a very stiff/sturdy material. So living things are soft and mushy (even Ahnold) compared to, say, building materials for skyscrapers or airplanes. Also, it's tough to build good computers out of biological materials, and without a couple billion years of evolution, we'd be as dumb as lettuce.
So if nanotech can make smarter artifacts out of stiffer materials than biology can, it's conceivable that nanotech could overrun biological life. IIRC, Drexler's original horror story was that the _entire_biosphere_ could be consumed; maybe if the experiment were really done, we might find some equilibrium where some biological life still existed.
It turns out that gray goo is a very tough engineering problem. Imagine building a car that could wander through the woods, foraging for fuel. The energy density in the woods is very low on average, and the car is unlikely to find the energy it wants before it runs out of its previous fuel supply. The varieties of fuel-like things that it might find is staggering: maple sap, starchy vegetables growing wild, beehives with honey in them, dried wood, a half-empty gas can in some barn, or the energy in the food in a kitchen. If the wild car is to be a real analogy for gray goo, it must recognize each possible energy source and be able to use it. Hard problem.
Because it's such a hard problem, nobody will do it by accident, any more than somebody will "accidentally" land safely on Mars. Also, whatever you're trying to accomplish by making gray goo, there is almost certainly a simpler cheaper way to accomplish it. Want to wipe out humanity? Make an AIDS variant that's mosquito-borne. Or do the same with ebola or smallpox. A few people want to wipe out humanity, but far fewer people want to wipe out all plant and animal life on Earth.
The point of Drexler and Phoenix's recent work, and this probably isn't quite emphasized strongly enough in these recent commentaries, is that gray goo isn't even a very good manufacturing paradigm. Chris Phoenix has been thinking a lot recently about sensible nanotech manufacturing strategies, and they look a lot more like SIMD vector processors. You have a broadcast instruction stream driving a bunch of individually stupid actuators. Duplicating the program store and instruction decoding for each actuator is wasteful, in terms of both material and reliability.
Plenty of PhDs have been out of work in recent years. Offering a strange employment niche like that might not be so bad. We of lesser academic stature can sometimes have an advantage in a soft economy. Employers expect us to be more negotiable on salary, and sometimes being underemployed is better than being unemployed.
I think we need a new variety of tax status for businesses, designed to provide employment first and profits second. Such a business could not be publicly owned or traded, so the SEC rule about prioritizing shareholder interest over employment wouldn't apply. It would get tax breaks in proportion to the number of U.S. citizens it employed. It would face tax liabilities for any work it contracted out, especially outside the U.S. There might be something about sweetening the tax incentives for jobs created in economically distressed parts of the country.
Reaching space? I think not. Some conjecture that such a thing could be accomplished with rockets, but this is clear fallacy: once outside the atmosphere, there is nothing for the rocket to push against.
This may seem a surprising thing to do, but in fact it makes good sense to commoditize the products that complement your own. For IBM, a hardware vendor, that's the OS. For Microsoft, an OS vendor, that's hardware.
For the last twenty years, Microsoft has been extraordinarily successful in commoditizing PC hardware. This has not been good news for IBM (though most of IBM's problems over that time have more to do with a misperception of where the market was going). Now IBM is turning the tables on Microsoft by commoditizing Linux, which if successful, will drive down the price of Windows and make it more affordable to buy computer hardware.
Nope, that dinosaur is purple. Maybe he turns pink when you cook him?
"Fortune favors the bold", huh? So what favors the feeble? Whatever that is, NASA should be shopping for some of that.
Come on, Torvalds and McBride action figures? Does anybody not want these? Maybe a Stallman action figure to muddy the waters with periodic confusing rants.
It's easy enough to polish the metal, but I'm not sure about getting it flat enough. You want the reflection to stay together over a distance of maybe a half-mile or a mile, and you're doing this with, what, Bronze Age technology? I don't rule it out as a possibility, but if I were in Archimedes' position, I don't know how I'd get good enough flatness.
Assuming they could get the flatness, I guess the aiming wouldn't be that hard. The idea for each guy to wiggle his reflection on the beach could work just as well on the target, and might help with the blinding idea. It also occurs to me that it might be even more effective to ignite masts rather than sails. (Help for nautically challenged: Sail = big hunk of cloth, mast = thick wooden stick that holds it up)
I think you're right that this story is probably apocryphal. It's hard to imagine that good mirrors would have been inexpensive enough in those days to make this practical. It's also difficult to imagine how they got coordinated enough to get all the reflections onto one spot.
I read Ender's Game and SFtD a very long time ago, I remember liking both but never getting around to Xenocide. I'm glad I didn't miss much.
I crave closure to this story that has been the prevailing epic in my life.
Understandable. I feel the same way if I don't watch myself, and remembering "it's just a bunch of movies" is still a conscious effort.
One of these days I should get into the "Expanded Universe" stuff. Everything I've heard is that it delivers on the promise where the movies ran out of steam.
Lucas says he planned a series of movies all along but nobody believed it until Empire Strikes Back. Suddenly Star Wars seemed as deep as Star Trek. Together the two movies implied a much bigger background than the first one alone. We all started drinking the Joseph Campbell kool-aid.
Return of the Jedi did a nice job of continuing the mystique and mythology, but the sucky Ewoks started to make it easier to step back and think, hey, it's just a bunch of movies. Episodes 1 and 2 have completed that process.
We don't understand parallel universes. Or at least I don't. So hey, it's all good. I, for one, welcome our new parallel universe overlords.