Why do you think I added the, "meaningful, say the range of a Star Trek warp drive in a human lifetime," clause to that line? There's "So rare that it will take a long time to discover or communicate with the Other," and there's "So rare that we are physically incapable of discovering or communicating with the Other." Since it was a hypothetical question, that clause was to dump us into the second category from the first.
Offhand, and the moment I'll guess that sophisticated life may be more likely to emerge on a moon orbiting a super-Jovian. If we presume that "odd" planetary dynamics are necessary to kick life up the evolutionary ladder, we've got some pretty odd dynamics right here around Jupiter and Saturn. Move them in a bit warmer, which is where many of the discovered planets are, and maybe you get something. (And no, I'm not seeking Pandora, I'm looking at the various outer planet probes.)
Read that, it's not the only place I've seen the suggestion. Obviously Asimov's science fiction doesn't constitute either fact or rigorous theory, but he also was generally not way out in left field, unless necessary for a major plot device like hyper drive or positronic brains.
I remember hearing years back that we were trying to generate models that would accrete solar systems out of dust clouds - "from first principles". At the time I read about it, none of those models would generate a solar system like ours.
Many have suggested that our oversized moon (oversized relative to Earth) is responsible for higher life, intelligent life, technological life, etc. The Earth-moon system also seems to have required a "just-right" collision between two bodies of just-right size at the just-right aiming, angle, and velocity.
What if all of these conditions really are necessary - what if there isn't another more probable way to have intelligent life? (This presumes that we qualify as "intelligent" - most of the time I think we don't qualify as "wise". (as in "sapiens"))
What if in the "meaningful" universe, by some definition of meaningful, say the range of a Star Trek warp drive in a human lifetime, we really are alone?
At the very least, it makes laying waste to a functioning biosphere an even bigger crime. One could also go nuts with religious implications.
One underlying cause I heard for the Pacific element of WWII was that the second-tier of Japanese government had too much power. They had managed to accumulate enough power to push the nation into war, without the experience to understand the probable consequences. Though I'll exclude Yamamoto from that last statement - he seemed to understand what was likely to happen, obeyed orders like a good soldier, and planned the best strategy he could to avoid what he anticipated.
I didn't make the stuff up - I've heard it from multiple sources, though I'll admit that they may have been biased. In fact, the last source was the displays at Paerl Harbor. It's also entirely possible that Weber is biased, as well.
My wife is a bit of an FDR nerd and is fairly well-read, so I'll have to ask her about this one.
| Demand the sky. You won't get it. The smug sense of entitlement is problematic at best. The world owes you a | living? Fat chance. Work or starve.
You're at least partly right, that feeling of entitlement is a BIG problem around here. But as long as we're attacking entitlement, let's be fair about it. If I'm not entitled to my low-6-figure job, then it may well follow that my CEO is not entitled to his 8-figure job. If that bad mortgage back before 2008 was the fault of the poor shmuck who didn't read and comprehend the fine print, then it may well follow that the mortgage investor who bought those too-good-to-be-true certificates deserves a share of the loss, too.
If the average American is no longer entitled to "The American Dream", the perhaps the 1% is no longer entitled to take all of the American Dream for themselves, either.
Aye! Depends on if you're into pies with all the fixin's, and an Abbey and all the religious trappin's with nary a shade o' religion, etc, etc, etc.
Actually, my kids loved the Redwall books. I read one or two with them, but there's only so much virtuous mice eating well, evil rats, and other critters with charming accents that one can take.
I'll give you a little "better" response on human nature. I have 2 sources, which no doubt are not original, but that doesn't matter. Think in terms of discussing philosophy with Bomb #20.
Point 1 - Mine - "I may be wrong." It's always important to admit that, and to adjust your actions accordingly. How much misery has been caused by "Acting with the courage or our convictions" or "Doing what we know is RIGHT"? That is not to say never act, but we often put our blinders on with our own ideas. Me included.
Point 2 - In the novel "Earth" David Brin at one point tried to distill "three culturally-neutral definitions for sanity". To be honest, I've forgotten his third, and wasn't sufficiently impressed by it at the time - perhaps my failing. But the first 2 were really good.
Culturally-Neutral Sanity 1 - The abilitiy to be satiated. The ability to recognize that you have enough, and quit seeking more. We generally recognize satiation in everything except money, power, and to a lesser extent, sex. 2 - The ability to adjust your plans to fit changing circumstances. Or as (I believe it was) Einstein put it, "Insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over, expecting different results."
So there, how about 3 meaningful prescriptions. Of course I may be wrong - perhaps the best way to run a world is unlimited exercise of personal greed by all. But I don't think so.
> the only country ever to actually drop nuclear bombs on civilian cities, twice.
True, and the US has used nuclear blackmail more than any other country, regrettably.
But there is another perspective on having used the nuclear bomb in war - historical necessity. There are many who say that a "demonstration event" would have sufficed, that the nuclear bomb need never have been used in war. Unfortunately I don't believe that. I don't believe that there would ever be sufficient fear of the nuclear bomb until it had actually been used to demolish a real city and kill real people. Also unfortunately, there was a very narrow window when that could be done "safely" - without the threat of a full-fledged nuclear exchange. That was the few years when the US had the Bomb and the USSR didn't.
Plus if you ever studied the period, you'll see that many feel that using the bomb saved at least a million lives on both sides - the cost of a protracted air/sea/land war in the Pacific. Even the Hiroshima bomb didn't convince Japan to surrender - they felt that there could only ever be one bomb like that. After Nagasaki, the surrendered because they thought that we could just keep dropping bomb after bomb like that - the first one wasn't unique. What they didn't realize was that at the time we'd made 3 bombs, Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki - that we'd shot our wad. I don't know how far in time we were from a fourth, and I don't know how Japan would have acted had they known we couldn't do it a third time, even.
Which scares you more, Stuxnet and Flame, which at the very least appear to have been fairly specifically targeted, or Iran with nuclear weapons?
In another way, at least Stuxnet and Flame have come to light, show us what's possible, and start us thinking about how to counter. Imagine a world where such capabilities had been kept in the dark until used on a public infrastructure attack.
Nobody is a super-being. But that doesn't mean we can't try to be better. I suppose my statements have their share of ignorance, but there's plenty more elsewhere in this thread, and I'd say that much of it is worse. In the meantime, assert some counters and show how they're truer and less ignorant.
Hidden behind the scenes of this discussions is the inherent and unquestioned assumption that capitalism is good.
Note that I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that there is an entrenched belief here even stronger than religion. The arguments all seem to be "whose definition of capitalism" and "One True Scotsman" type of arguments. But under it all is the (again) unquestioned assumption that capitalism (appropriately defined, of course) is the One True Way of resource management.
Again, in this I'm not questioning capitalism, I'm questioning the degree to which it has become a base assumption.
So here's a bit of a progression...
1 - Democracy and elections are good - not because they generate the best government, but because when properly executed, they peacefully remove and replace the government. Sometimes the replacement is better, sometimes worse, but at the very least, the replacement process is less disruptive and wasteful than a bloody revolution. If democracy were really working well, principally if the electorate chose to educate themselves well, governance would get incrementally better, where "better" is defined by a majority of the people. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
2 - Capitalism is good - not because it does the best job of distributing resources, but because when properly executed, bad players in the system exit and others take their place. If the market were properly transparent, and properly policed, even if only by its participants, the job of distributing resources would get incrementally better. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the "profit motive". It's a nod to human nature, recognizing that personal gain can be highly motivating. Other than that motivational factor, "profit" is simply inefficiency in moving goods from supplier to consumer. The real idea behind the "free market" is that it harnesses chaos - a sort of natural selection of a wide array of ideas. When incumbants are able to suppress emergents, the free market is failing.
It's amusing/astonishing/sad that people rail at the thought of economic central planning by a government, yet accept economic central planning by entrenched market incumbants. It's not the government that's the enemy, it's the central planning, by whatever party. Some amount of chaos must exist, some continual level of instability, or the system isn't really working.
Food for thought... In a world with nuclear bombs, genetically engineered virii, and other results of high technology becoming widely available, "human nature" is no longer good enough. If we don't start doing better than "human nature", we'll probably stop doing. Thinking about it a little, we're more likely to crash our society, crash our population, lose our technology, and be lucky to work our way back to a feudal steam age. (The easy energy is gone. The easy resources are gone, perhaps accessible in landfills, perhaps locked up in alloys that need high energy and high-tech to get out.)
That may happen, but antibiotic resistance usually happens because of overprescription, and people not following directions. Since there aren't many cases of Plague, pretty much any time it does pop up, those people are under careful care, so if there is any antibiotic resistance to it, it's probably because of "environmental antibiotics" - pets under treatment peeing excess, same for farm animals, leaching landfills, etc.
My brother-in-law is a veterinarian in southeast Utah, and he found one of those "every few years" cases of bubonic plague a few years back. He told me the same thing - a case pops up every few years.
I found the writing to be horribly flawed, but he threw such fun ideas at me so fast that I didn't care. From Rat Thing to Reason to pizza delivery to smart wheels to the whole Sumerian language thing, to name only a few.
It's a collection of short stories about the "Asteriod Republic" wrapped in a frame of the first interstellar flight. One of the stories features a military vessel whose electronics were built with "TEMMs" - Thermionic Emission Micro-Miniaturized - featured for its radiation hardness.
For onething, at least one launch was aborted after the SSMEs fired, 6 seconds before the SRBs were set to fire. Did you never listen to the radio control patter, especially during the early shuttle launches. They were careful to say what "window options" were open during each phase of the flight. There was "abort to launch site", "abort tranatlantic", (to Spain, I believe.) and "abort to orbit:". Beyond that, there were points where various abort or even mission completion options could be accomplished with a one-engine fail, or later on even with a two-engine fail.
Much as it may be fun to bash NASA, they've probably forgotten more about such mission control aspects than private industry has had the chance to learn yet. While we're still bashing NASA, they've probably forgotten many of their own lessons.
I'm not sure, but I don't think Vermont even has the right kind of geology for gas or oil. The Green Mountains are very old, I believe metamorphic rock, and I thought natural gas and oil are generally in sedimentary deposits - sandstone with a limestone cap, or some such.
I suspect the ban is a symbolic gesture, already knowing that nothing is really at risk.
Actually, the super solar flare was in the second book of the series, "Sunstorm". It's not giving much away to say that it wasn't an accident, either. Just finished the series last week.
Wouldn't it make more sense to put steel sleeves into this, and as you say, other metal parts into high-stress areas? Philosophical purity has little (but not no) place in the real world.
This is what I've been wondering about with 3D printing... From what I've seen, current additive 3D printing has been with plastic, though I'll admit that my knowledge is sketchy.
Seems to me that it would be a simple matter to use 3D printing to build a model for traditional metal casting methods. But as mentioned, none of that gives you the strength of forged metal. So is there a way to combine 3D printing with casting and some sort of "generic" forging process?
Anonymous is another (clearly not the first) example of what I'll for lack of a better term, call a "virtual nation".
It's obvious that the internet allows rapid worldwide communication. It's also obvious that it allows new aggregations of people to sort themselves out - that you can draw together like-minded people from all over the globe. What's less-than-obvious is to call these aggregates "virtual nations".
But take a look at it from a slightly different perspective. People whose primary news source is Fox news live in the Unites States of America, and are quite proud of the fact. People whose primary news source is NPR also live in the United States of America, and are also quite proud of that fact. But when you ask the two groups of people what they thing the United States of America really is, beyond simple geographic attributes, you get two very different answers, two very different sets of allegiances. It's almost like they live in different nations. Perhaps in some sort of virtual way, they do.
But perhaps the best and worst example of a virtual nation is Al Qaeda. There is a group of people whose allegiance has little to do with physical boarders. Their sense of belonging, their cause, their peers transcend the mere physical. (Note that interesting characteristics don't make it good, and in this case, far from it.)
Anonymous is a less mature, less cohesive, less dangerous version.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think I added the, "meaningful, say the range of a Star Trek warp drive in a human lifetime," clause to that line? There's "So rare that it will take a long time to discover or communicate with the Other," and there's "So rare that we are physically incapable of discovering or communicating with the Other." Since it was a hypothetical question, that clause was to dump us into the second category from the first.
Offhand, and the moment I'll guess that sophisticated life may be more likely to emerge on a moon orbiting a super-Jovian. If we presume that "odd" planetary dynamics are necessary to kick life up the evolutionary ladder, we've got some pretty odd dynamics right here around Jupiter and Saturn. Move them in a bit warmer, which is where many of the discovered planets are, and maybe you get something. (And no, I'm not seeking Pandora, I'm looking at the various outer planet probes.)
Read that, it's not the only place I've seen the suggestion. Obviously Asimov's science fiction doesn't constitute either fact or rigorous theory, but he also was generally not way out in left field, unless necessary for a major plot device like hyper drive or positronic brains.
I remember hearing years back that we were trying to generate models that would accrete solar systems out of dust clouds - "from first principles". At the time I read about it, none of those models would generate a solar system like ours.
Many have suggested that our oversized moon (oversized relative to Earth) is responsible for higher life, intelligent life, technological life, etc. The Earth-moon system also seems to have required a "just-right" collision between two bodies of just-right size at the just-right aiming, angle, and velocity.
What if all of these conditions really are necessary - what if there isn't another more probable way to have intelligent life? (This presumes that we qualify as "intelligent" - most of the time I think we don't qualify as "wise". (as in "sapiens"))
What if in the "meaningful" universe, by some definition of meaningful, say the range of a Star Trek warp drive in a human lifetime, we really are alone?
At the very least, it makes laying waste to a functioning biosphere an even bigger crime.
One could also go nuts with religious implications.
One underlying cause I heard for the Pacific element of WWII was that the second-tier of Japanese government had too much power. They had managed to accumulate enough power to push the nation into war, without the experience to understand the probable consequences. Though I'll exclude Yamamoto from that last statement - he seemed to understand what was likely to happen, obeyed orders like a good soldier, and planned the best strategy he could to avoid what he anticipated.
I didn't make the stuff up - I've heard it from multiple sources, though I'll admit that they may have been biased. In fact, the last source was the displays at Paerl Harbor. It's also entirely possible that Weber is biased, as well.
My wife is a bit of an FDR nerd and is fairly well-read, so I'll have to ask her about this one.
| |How dare you demand a living wage.
| Demand the sky. You won't get it. The smug sense of entitlement is problematic at best. The world owes you a
| living? Fat chance. Work or starve.
You're at least partly right, that feeling of entitlement is a BIG problem around here. But as long as we're attacking entitlement, let's be fair about it. If I'm not entitled to my low-6-figure job, then it may well follow that my CEO is not entitled to his 8-figure job. If that bad mortgage back before 2008 was the fault of the poor shmuck who didn't read and comprehend the fine print, then it may well follow that the mortgage investor who bought those too-good-to-be-true certificates deserves a share of the loss, too.
If the average American is no longer entitled to "The American Dream", the perhaps the 1% is no longer entitled to take all of the American Dream for themselves, either.
Aye! Depends on if you're into pies with all the fixin's, and an Abbey and all the religious trappin's with nary a shade o' religion, etc, etc, etc.
Actually, my kids loved the Redwall books. I read one or two with them, but there's only so much virtuous mice eating well, evil rats, and other critters with charming accents that one can take.
Oh, I'm sure we're not. But at least more people are aware that the rabbit hole exists.
I'll give you a little "better" response on human nature. I have 2 sources, which no doubt are not original, but that doesn't matter. Think in terms of discussing philosophy with Bomb #20.
Point 1 - Mine - "I may be wrong." It's always important to admit that, and to adjust your actions accordingly. How much misery has been caused by "Acting with the courage or our convictions" or "Doing what we know is RIGHT"? That is not to say never act, but we often put our blinders on with our own ideas. Me included.
Point 2 - In the novel "Earth" David Brin at one point tried to distill "three culturally-neutral definitions for sanity". To be honest, I've forgotten his third, and wasn't sufficiently impressed by it at the time - perhaps my failing. But the first 2 were really good.
Culturally-Neutral Sanity
1 - The abilitiy to be satiated. The ability to recognize that you have enough, and quit seeking more. We generally recognize satiation in everything except money, power, and to a lesser extent, sex.
2 - The ability to adjust your plans to fit changing circumstances. Or as (I believe it was) Einstein put it, "Insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over, expecting different results."
So there, how about 3 meaningful prescriptions. Of course I may be wrong - perhaps the best way to run a world is unlimited exercise of personal greed by all. But I don't think so.
> the only country ever to actually drop nuclear bombs on civilian cities, twice.
True, and the US has used nuclear blackmail more than any other country, regrettably.
But there is another perspective on having used the nuclear bomb in war - historical necessity. There are many who say that a "demonstration event" would have sufficed, that the nuclear bomb need never have been used in war. Unfortunately I don't believe that. I don't believe that there would ever be sufficient fear of the nuclear bomb until it had actually been used to demolish a real city and kill real people. Also unfortunately, there was a very narrow window when that could be done "safely" - without the threat of a full-fledged nuclear exchange. That was the few years when the US had the Bomb and the USSR didn't.
Plus if you ever studied the period, you'll see that many feel that using the bomb saved at least a million lives on both sides - the cost of a protracted air/sea/land war in the Pacific. Even the Hiroshima bomb didn't convince Japan to surrender - they felt that there could only ever be one bomb like that. After Nagasaki, the surrendered because they thought that we could just keep dropping bomb after bomb like that - the first one wasn't unique. What they didn't realize was that at the time we'd made 3 bombs, Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki - that we'd shot our wad. I don't know how far in time we were from a fourth, and I don't know how Japan would have acted had they known we couldn't do it a third time, even.
Which scares you more, Stuxnet and Flame, which at the very least appear to have been fairly specifically targeted, or Iran with nuclear weapons?
In another way, at least Stuxnet and Flame have come to light, show us what's possible, and start us thinking about how to counter. Imagine a world where such capabilities had been kept in the dark until used on a public infrastructure attack.
Nobody is a super-being. But that doesn't mean we can't try to be better. I suppose my statements have their share of ignorance, but there's plenty more elsewhere in this thread, and I'd say that much of it is worse. In the meantime, assert some counters and show how they're truer and less ignorant.
Hidden behind the scenes of this discussions is the inherent and unquestioned assumption that capitalism is good.
Note that I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that there is an entrenched belief here even stronger than religion. The arguments all seem to be "whose definition of capitalism" and "One True Scotsman" type of arguments. But under it all is the (again) unquestioned assumption that capitalism (appropriately defined, of course) is the One True Way of resource management.
Again, in this I'm not questioning capitalism, I'm questioning the degree to which it has become a base assumption.
So here's a bit of a progression...
1 - Democracy and elections are good - not because they generate the best government, but because when properly executed, they peacefully remove and replace the government. Sometimes the replacement is better, sometimes worse, but at the very least, the replacement process is less disruptive and wasteful than a bloody revolution. If democracy were really working well, principally if the electorate chose to educate themselves well, governance would get incrementally better, where "better" is defined by a majority of the people. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
2 - Capitalism is good - not because it does the best job of distributing resources, but because when properly executed, bad players in the system exit and others take their place. If the market were properly transparent, and properly policed, even if only by its participants, the job of distributing resources would get incrementally better. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the "profit motive". It's a nod to human nature, recognizing that personal gain can be highly motivating. Other than that motivational factor, "profit" is simply inefficiency in moving goods from supplier to consumer. The real idea behind the "free market" is that it harnesses chaos - a sort of natural selection of a wide array of ideas. When incumbants are able to suppress emergents, the free market is failing.
It's amusing/astonishing/sad that people rail at the thought of economic central planning by a government, yet accept economic central planning by entrenched market incumbants. It's not the government that's the enemy, it's the central planning, by whatever party. Some amount of chaos must exist, some continual level of instability, or the system isn't really working.
Food for thought...
In a world with nuclear bombs, genetically engineered virii, and other results of high technology becoming widely available, "human nature" is no longer good enough. If we don't start doing better than "human nature", we'll probably stop doing. Thinking about it a little, we're more likely to crash our society, crash our population, lose our technology, and be lucky to work our way back to a feudal steam age. (The easy energy is gone. The easy resources are gone, perhaps accessible in landfills, perhaps locked up in alloys that need high energy and high-tech to get out.)
That may happen, but antibiotic resistance usually happens because of overprescription, and people not following directions. Since there aren't many cases of Plague, pretty much any time it does pop up, those people are under careful care, so if there is any antibiotic resistance to it, it's probably because of "environmental antibiotics" - pets under treatment peeing excess, same for farm animals, leaching landfills, etc.
My brother-in-law is a veterinarian in southeast Utah, and he found one of those "every few years" cases of bubonic plague a few years back. He told me the same thing - a case pops up every few years.
I found the writing to be horribly flawed, but he threw such fun ideas at me so fast that I didn't care. From Rat Thing to Reason to pizza delivery to smart wheels to the whole Sumerian language thing, to name only a few.
Makes you want to "Reason" with them, doesn't it.
"Tales of the Flying Mountains" by Poul Anderson
It's a collection of short stories about the "Asteriod Republic" wrapped in a frame of the first interstellar flight. One of the stories features a military vessel whose electronics were built with "TEMMs" - Thermionic Emission Micro-Miniaturized - featured for its radiation hardness.
For onething, at least one launch was aborted after the SSMEs fired, 6 seconds before the SRBs were set to fire. Did you never listen to the radio control patter, especially during the early shuttle launches. They were careful to say what "window options" were open during each phase of the flight. There was "abort to launch site", "abort tranatlantic", (to Spain, I believe.) and "abort to orbit:". Beyond that, there were points where various abort or even mission completion options could be accomplished with a one-engine fail, or later on even with a two-engine fail.
Much as it may be fun to bash NASA, they've probably forgotten more about such mission control aspects than private industry has had the chance to learn yet. While we're still bashing NASA, they've probably forgotten many of their own lessons.
I'm not sure, but I don't think Vermont even has the right kind of geology for gas or oil. The Green Mountains are very old, I believe metamorphic rock, and I thought natural gas and oil are generally in sedimentary deposits - sandstone with a limestone cap, or some such.
I suspect the ban is a symbolic gesture, already knowing that nothing is really at risk.
Actually, the super solar flare was in the second book of the series, "Sunstorm". It's not giving much away to say that it wasn't an accident, either. Just finished the series last week.
Wouldn't it make more sense to put steel sleeves into this, and as you say, other metal parts into high-stress areas? Philosophical purity has little (but not no) place in the real world.
This is what I've been wondering about with 3D printing... From what I've seen, current additive 3D printing has been with plastic, though I'll admit that my knowledge is sketchy.
Seems to me that it would be a simple matter to use 3D printing to build a model for traditional metal casting methods. But as mentioned, none of that gives you the strength of forged metal. So is there a way to combine 3D printing with casting and some sort of "generic" forging process?
Heck, I'd settle for putting a lump of coal into it, to get diamonds, just like Superman.
Anonymous is another (clearly not the first) example of what I'll for lack of a better term, call a "virtual nation".
It's obvious that the internet allows rapid worldwide communication. It's also obvious that it allows new aggregations of people to sort themselves out - that you can draw together like-minded people from all over the globe.
What's less-than-obvious is to call these aggregates "virtual nations".
But take a look at it from a slightly different perspective. People whose primary news source is Fox news live in the Unites States of America, and are quite proud of the fact. People whose primary news source is NPR also live in the United States of America, and are also quite proud of that fact. But when you ask the two groups of people what they thing the United States of America really is, beyond simple geographic attributes, you get two very different answers, two very different sets of allegiances. It's almost like they live in different nations. Perhaps in some sort of virtual way, they do.
But perhaps the best and worst example of a virtual nation is Al Qaeda. There is a group of people whose allegiance has little to do with physical boarders. Their sense of belonging, their cause, their peers transcend the mere physical. (Note that interesting characteristics don't make it good, and in this case, far from it.)
Anonymous is a less mature, less cohesive, less dangerous version.