The problem with estimating launch costs is that a back of the envelop estimate suggests that they should already be low. A 1960s saturnV used about 500,000 gallons of Kerosene (representing most of the fuel mass), and put about 200,000 pounds in orbit. So the fuel costs to launch was about $10/pound (if you happily assume oxygen is cheap - its free in the atmosphere).
The real costs are the capital, engineering maintenance,etc. Someone would need to explain why an enormous high-tech gun is so much less expensive in these areas than a conventional rocket. It might well be true - but hand-wave type estimates can be very deceptive.
I think a lot will depend on the extent to which the robot operator is held responsible for the semi-autonomous robot's actions. If the human is completely responsible, it might make ware less deadly. If the human can use the excuse "well the automatic targeting system mistakenly identified the 5 year old with a tricycle as an enemy robot - its a terrible shame, we need to update the recognition system" - then you have problems.
There is a tendency for large organizations to avoid placing blame on any particular person - so the military might tend to deflect blame from the human operator. In fact the blame IS unclear - is it the operator, or one of the possibly thousands of programmers involved in the pattern recognition algorithms in the robot?
Even if the technology is perfected, there are some interesting privacy issues. People don't have complete conscious control of their eyes, and where someone looks at an image can reveal information that they might wish kept private. Are you looking at the cute girl in the picture- or the cute guy? Are you looking at the image of the fancy car - maybe you should get a targeted add. Related technology may be able to read something about your facial expression.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the technology, but I think there need to be some limits on how the input data can be used. So far what you input to a computer or phone is completely under your own control. This would provide some input that you did not control.
Hard to imagine installing a spying device with a glowing red LED, but then the TSA isn't known for its stunning efficiency. More likely the just screwed up his computer and some standard warning light was activated.
They should owe him a new computer and say 100 hours of consulting time to ensure that his data and software are properly transfered to the new computer. Say $30K total.
But that's the point. My chances of being on one of those 12 airliners is small - 12 out of something like 10 MILLION flights in the US per year.
That is like saying that I'd wish there were more effort taken to stop sharks if I were one of the people who was mauled. Sure - but the same is true for lightning, meteors, E-coli infections, and catching rabies from rabid squirrels.
We have limited resources to apply to a very wide range of ways to die. We should spend them where they will do the most good.
They won because we (Americans, Europeans) are stupid cowards. Your chances of being killed by terrorists in the US and Europe are vanishingly small. One estimate puts it at one in 10 million per year, about the same as being eaten by a shark and a thousand times less likely than being killed in a house fire.
Another statistic gives 22000 worldwide deaths / year from terrorism compared with 57 million from other causes.
What is the big deal? Why should I give up freedoms, privacy and time for this?
I fly very frequently and I am not afraid of terrorists. I'd be happy to walk through a metal detector set to pick up conventional guns, and run my luggage (laptop still in case) through an X-ray to look for obvious weapons. When terrorists down a US airline every month for a year we can talk again.
The problem is that by doing extra security checks on the >>99% of Muslims who are not terrorists, you anger enough people that you may create more terrorists than you stop. People do not like to be treated in a fashion they consider to be unfair. Some become angry. Some tiny (but not insignificant) portion of those will act on their anger.
Congratulations on learning to fly, its a real achievement. Unfortunately though you will find that flying private planes isn't as useful for transportation as you might hope. I fly my plane (Bonanza) when I can, but for a lot of trips the airlines are the only practical way to go. If you are wealthy enough to fly your own jet (maybe you are) things are somewhat different.
I like Fedora, but it treats fonts in a strange way the prevents some applications (EPICS) we have at my lab from running. I found a work-around in fedora8 and 9, but after 10 haven't figured out how to make it work.
Google may be just making a high stakes gamble - they can afford it. D-wave appears to be a typical case of science meets marketing. Marketing wildly distorts the results - but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is no science.
Personally I'd be surprised if quantum computing can be made practical - quantum states are very fragile, but its not impossible.
While I don't agree with your argument, your post certainly wasn't a troll - someone is mis-using mod points. So - in the real world how can peer review be made to work - especially in a field where such a stunning amount of money and political pressure is involved? I'll agree that there is a problem - but how to fix it.
It is a running joke with the people I work with that a PhD makes you an "expert" in a field - and most of us have PhDs. In most sciences, a PhD represents the start of your career.
That aside though how should the public decide who to listen to? With thousands (or in the days of the internet millions) of different voices there is no way to pay attention to everyone.
While it is tempting to suggest that everyone study the issue for themselves, but these issues are complex and require a large investment in time. I'm not saying that an average person couldn't understand, but rather that they can't afford to take the required time.
I don't know anything about climate science, but in other fields it takes literally years to gain enough background information to understand the discussions. It is find for public-minded physicists to talk about the Higgs as a "god particle" and "generating mass" but those words have very little do to with the real theory.
So if we don't use education level as an indicator, what do we use to determine where we should direct our attention? (serious question - how do we decide among the millions of voices?)
Yes - it is a real problem. How do you tell who is a "scientist", or more importantly, how do you tell whose comments are important enough to study?
I remember as a grad student getting a paper from someone who had a new theory of magnetism based on the "spherical photon". He had even done experiments with an old radio set. I looked at it very briefly, and it didn't seem to be based on conventional science, and it didn't seem to make any new testable predictions so I ignored it. But what else could I reasonably do?
I think that in order to do science you need to understand the existing state of the art and know the language. This is a large barrier to discussion, but I don't see a good option.
There is a lot known about most science fields (I think far more than the public realizes), and maybe it makes sense for people to catch up on that before trying to extend the knowledge.
You don't need a PhD to publish in a refereed journal. If you find an article you disagree with, publish a different analysis.
Most science really is difficult. You don't need a formal education, but you do need to be able to read the real journal articles (not some condensed version) and write coherent objections. Even better - join a climate research group.
My field (high energy accelerators) has nothing to do with with climate change, but it has similar problems. When we propose a multi-billion dollar, 10s of kilometer long accelerator, someone will argue we should use NEW laser acceleration technology - it would let you build the accelerator on a tabletop. The arguments as to why this doesn't work are quite technical - but are nonetheless true. (BTW - its just to dang expensive IS a perfectly valid argument)
I mostly agree with an open review system, but there are a few issues. Reviews probably need to remain anonymous in some fields to prevent the scientific equivalent of "log rolling" : providing good review to people who gave you favourable reviews. Some fields are small enough that the pool of available reviewers is tiny.
I am very much in favor of making government funded scientific research available to the public but again there are a few problems: In many fields your career depends on publishing papers. You don't want someone to spend a lot of effort developing an experiment and then someone else publishes first based based on the data (without full credit going to the original experimenter). Of course you also don't want an experiment to sit on data for years before it is released.
Making the data public can have different meanings: You can provide the "raw" data to the public - this is usually useless - "here, have 100 TB of unlabelled binary data". But, the alternative might be to require the scientists to process the data and provide it in a easily interpreted form - this could be a very large added workload.
I'm fortunate enough to work in a field (accelerator physics) where publishing is not particularly important to my career, so everything I work on is available. I do work with X-ray experimenters who feel they need to keep their work quite until they publish - they are worried that someone else will publish first.
I can't tell from the article, but you probably generate an electromagnetic wave the carries the momentum. This would be similar to using a flash-light for propulsion - the light doesn't lose mass, but the photons do provide thrust.
This isn't a recipe for a practical propulsion system but is is still interesting as a physics experiment.
I think the problem is that it is a fundamentally difficult issue. Climate models are far from perfect, There is a huge amount of raw data, but few long term consistent data sets. The public wants a clear statement: "water world" or "no problem" when the best science can provide is approximate probabilities for various outcomes.
Adding to the problem is the tremendous scale of the costs and consequences. Trillions of dollars depend on the results of the science (either way). This provides a lot of economic bias to spin the results one way or the other.
One could argue that the potential costs of global warming are so large that we should take action even if we are not sure there is a problem. One could argue that the costs of fighting global warming are so large that we should not take action until we have clear proof. Often people's opinions of these depend on whether they gain or lose from the costs.
I think that all we can do is make an attempt to not politicise the science, and listen to the scientist's conclusions. Having non-scientists state opinions about the data and analysis just adds to the confusion. Science is HARD - not really a good place for non-experts. (would you want a non-expert performing heart surgery or flying an airliner?). If you decide you can't trust the scientists - I think you are just screwed - who could you trust instead?
There are a whole list of things that are legal that a reasonable person might want to hide.
Purchasing habits that might allow vendors to sell products at higher prices: If it were discovered that I do not comparison shop well, I could find all of my online purchases becoming more expensive (eg. I would not receive "special offers" for lower prices).
An interest in a criminal activity is not the same as committing the criminal act: I might want to read about terrorist techniques even if I have no interest in committing terrorism my self. I might want to use this information to make a legally protected political statement about my government's anti-terrorism policies
Medical information can be embarrassing: If I shop for viagra or adult diapers, I don't want that information available to the public
Searches can imply a connection that isn't real: I once searched for Uranium, Lithium Hydride and high explosives in the same day. They were for 3 unrelated legitimate projects, I was not trying to build a hydrogen bomb.
Searches that trigger a police investigation can cause significant hardship: The police can confiscate computers and all copies of your data for years on suspicion of illegal activities. Data mining of vast numbers of searches can result in false investigations.
Business searches can reveal strategies that should be private. If my people at my digital camera R+D facility start searching for information on bluetooth a competitor might realize that I was working on a product that had bluetooth connectivity, and beat me to a product announcement.
Political searches can reveal strategies that should be private: If a political candidate's office starts searching for information on lumber mills and employment in some city, it might indicate the sort of campaign strategy he is planning.
Personal lifestyles can be embarrassing: It is perfectly legal for a man to dress as little-bo-peep in the privacy of his home, but he might not want he searches for "little bo peep costume in XXXXXL size" to be public.
Does this allow a fishing expedition? If you are tracking a suspected drug dealer, and based on tracking can place him near the location of an unrelated crime is that admissible in court? Can you you publicly release or threaten to release embarrassing but legal actions deduced from tracking (extra-marital affairs, homosexual activity etc.) in order to coerce a suspect to confess to a crime?
Yes, but you can calculate the time experienced by an accelerating object as long as you do the calculation in an (any) inertial frame. As I understand it, SR is the special case of GR when the metric is flat. As long as you can find a frame where that is true, you can use SR.
You can do the calculation in any frame. The "stationary" observer has a straight world line. The "moving" observer has a curved (or angled) world line. Due to the minus sign in the metric, the straight line is shorter so the "stationary" observer sees more proper (local clock) time.
Special relativity describes the "twin paradox" correctly - the traveler ages less because he has traveled more distance and accumulated less proper time. ds^2 = (dt^2 - dx^2). ds is the time measured by the moving clock, dt and dx are time and position in the original rest frame.
You only need general relativity for gravitation or some cases of strong acceleration.
I'm all in favour of experimental results, but FTL information transmission (on macroscopic scales) has such widespread implications for physics that it is mostly likely a sign the theory is wrong. There are a lot of experiments that indicate that the macroscopic structure of space-time matches special relativity. In that system if you have FTL information, you can send information back in time (by choosing a moving frame). That destroys causality, and a lot of the underpinnings of physics.
I'm not saying it is impossible - but it would require tremendous re-write of all known physics. For scientists to consider this, there would need to be a clear practical experiment.
Fermilab is collaborating on the LHC. Also, if the LHC fails it will pretty much be the end of large scale particle physics. Hard to ask for another $10B machine if the last one didn't work. Still - I'm very glad Fermi is supporting LHC.
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The problem with estimating launch costs is that a back of the envelop estimate suggests that they should already be low. A 1960s saturnV used about 500,000 gallons of Kerosene (representing most of the fuel mass), and put about 200,000 pounds in orbit. So the fuel costs to launch was about $10/pound (if you happily assume oxygen is cheap - its free in the atmosphere).
The real costs are the capital, engineering maintenance,etc. Someone would need to explain why an enormous high-tech gun is so much less expensive in these areas than a conventional rocket. It might well be true - but hand-wave type estimates can be very deceptive.
I think a lot will depend on the extent to which the robot operator is held responsible for the semi-autonomous robot's actions. If the human is completely responsible, it might make ware less deadly. If the human can use the excuse "well the automatic targeting system mistakenly identified the 5 year old with a tricycle as an enemy robot - its a terrible shame, we need to update the recognition system" - then you have problems.
There is a tendency for large organizations to avoid placing blame on any particular person - so the military might tend to deflect blame from the human operator. In fact the blame IS unclear - is it the operator, or one of the possibly thousands of programmers involved in the pattern recognition algorithms in the robot?
Even if the technology is perfected, there are some interesting privacy issues. People don't have complete conscious control of their eyes, and where someone looks at an image can reveal information that they might wish kept private. Are you looking at the cute girl in the picture- or the cute guy? Are you looking at the image of the fancy car - maybe you should get a targeted add. Related technology may be able to read something about your facial expression.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the technology, but I think there need to be some limits on how the input data can be used. So far what you input to a computer or phone is completely under your own control. This would provide some input that you did not control.
That still doesn't catch surgically implanted explosive devices - say a bomb designed to look like a kidney on a casual x-ray scan.
I think the only way to solve this is to outlaw all technology everywhere. Sure there will be some inconvenience, but isn't the safety worth it.
Hard to imagine installing a spying device with a glowing red LED, but then the TSA isn't known for its stunning efficiency. More likely the just screwed up his computer and some standard warning light was activated.
They should owe him a new computer and say 100 hours of consulting time to ensure that his data and software are properly transfered to the new computer. Say $30K total.
But that's the point. My chances of being on one of those 12 airliners is small - 12 out of something like 10 MILLION flights in the US per year.
That is like saying that I'd wish there were more effort taken to stop sharks if I were one of the people who was mauled. Sure - but the same is true for lightning, meteors, E-coli infections, and catching rabies from rabid squirrels.
We have limited resources to apply to a very wide range of ways to die. We should spend them where they will do the most good.
They won because we (Americans, Europeans) are stupid cowards. Your chances of being killed by terrorists in the US and Europe are vanishingly small. One estimate puts it at one in 10 million per year, about the same as being eaten by a shark and a thousand times less likely than being killed in a house fire.
(source was http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/05/07/13/the_six_most_feared_but_least_likely_causes_of_death.htm, now independent verification)
Another statistic gives 22000 worldwide deaths / year from terrorism compared with 57 million from other causes.
What is the big deal? Why should I give up freedoms, privacy and time for this?
I fly very frequently and I am not afraid of terrorists. I'd be happy to walk through a metal detector set to pick up conventional guns, and run my luggage (laptop still in case) through an X-ray to look for obvious weapons. When terrorists down a US airline every month for a year we can talk again.
The problem is that by doing extra security checks on the >>99% of Muslims who are not terrorists, you anger enough people that you may create more terrorists than you stop. People do not like to be treated in a fashion they consider to be unfair. Some become angry. Some tiny (but not insignificant) portion of those will act on their anger.
Congratulations on learning to fly, its a real achievement. Unfortunately though you will find that flying private planes isn't as useful for transportation as you might hope. I fly my plane (Bonanza) when I can, but for a lot of trips the airlines are the only practical way to go. If you are wealthy enough to fly your own jet (maybe you are) things are somewhat different.
I like Fedora, but it treats fonts in a strange way the prevents some applications (EPICS) we have at my lab from running. I found a work-around in fedora8 and 9, but after 10 haven't figured out how to make it work.
Google may be just making a high stakes gamble - they can afford it. D-wave appears to be a typical case of science meets marketing. Marketing wildly distorts the results - but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is no science.
Personally I'd be surprised if quantum computing can be made practical - quantum states are very fragile, but its not impossible.
While I don't agree with your argument, your post certainly wasn't a troll - someone is mis-using mod points.
So - in the real world how can peer review be made to work - especially in a field where such a stunning amount of money and political pressure is involved? I'll agree that there is a problem - but how to fix it.
It is a running joke with the people I work with that a PhD makes you an "expert" in a field - and most of us have PhDs. In most sciences, a PhD represents the start of your career.
That aside though how should the public decide who to listen to? With thousands (or in the days of the internet millions) of different voices there is no way to pay attention to everyone.
While it is tempting to suggest that everyone study the issue for themselves, but these issues are complex and require a large investment in time. I'm not saying that an average person couldn't understand, but rather that they can't afford to take the required time.
I don't know anything about climate science, but in other fields it takes literally years to gain enough background information to understand the discussions. It is find for public-minded physicists to talk about the Higgs as a "god particle" and "generating mass" but those words have very little do to with the real theory.
So if we don't use education level as an indicator, what do we use to determine where we should direct our attention? (serious question - how do we decide among the millions of voices?)
Yes - it is a real problem. How do you tell who is a "scientist", or more importantly, how do you tell whose comments are important enough to study?
I remember as a grad student getting a paper from someone who had a new theory of magnetism based on the "spherical photon". He had even done experiments with an old radio set. I looked at it very briefly, and it didn't seem to be based on conventional science, and it didn't seem to make any new testable predictions so I ignored it. But what else could I reasonably do?
I think that in order to do science you need to understand the existing state of the art and know the language. This is a large barrier to discussion, but I don't see a good option.
There is a lot known about most science fields (I think far more than the public realizes), and maybe it makes sense for people to catch up on that before trying to extend the knowledge.
You don't need a PhD to publish in a refereed journal. If you find an article you disagree with, publish a different analysis.
Most science really is difficult. You don't need a formal education, but you do need to be able to read the real journal articles (not some condensed version) and write coherent objections. Even better - join a climate research group.
My field (high energy accelerators) has nothing to do with with climate change, but it has similar problems. When we propose a multi-billion dollar, 10s of kilometer long accelerator, someone will argue we should use NEW laser acceleration technology - it would let you build the accelerator on a tabletop. The arguments as to why this doesn't work are quite technical - but are nonetheless true. (BTW - its just to dang expensive IS a perfectly valid argument)
I mostly agree with an open review system, but there are a few issues. Reviews probably need to remain anonymous in some fields to prevent the scientific equivalent of "log rolling" : providing good review to people who gave you favourable reviews. Some fields are small enough that the pool of available reviewers is tiny.
I am very much in favor of making government funded scientific research available to the public but again there are a few problems: In many fields your career depends on publishing papers. You don't want someone to spend a lot of effort developing an experiment and then someone else publishes first based based on the data (without full credit going to the original experimenter). Of course you also don't want an experiment to sit on data for years before it is released.
Making the data public can have different meanings: You can provide the "raw" data to the public - this is usually useless - "here, have 100 TB of unlabelled binary data". But, the alternative might be to require the scientists to process the data and provide it in a easily interpreted form - this could be a very large added workload.
I'm fortunate enough to work in a field (accelerator physics) where publishing is not particularly important to my career, so everything I work on is available. I do work with X-ray experimenters who feel they need to keep their work quite until they publish - they are worried that someone else will publish first.
I can't tell from the article, but you probably generate an electromagnetic wave the carries the momentum. This would be similar to using a flash-light for propulsion - the light doesn't lose mass, but the photons do provide thrust.
This isn't a recipe for a practical propulsion system but is is still interesting as a physics experiment.
I think the problem is that it is a fundamentally difficult issue. Climate models are far from perfect, There is a huge amount of raw data, but few long term consistent data sets. The public wants a clear statement: "water world" or "no problem" when the best science can provide is approximate probabilities for various outcomes.
Adding to the problem is the tremendous scale of the costs and consequences. Trillions of dollars depend on the results of the science (either way). This provides a lot of economic bias to spin the results one way or the other.
One could argue that the potential costs of global warming are so large that we should take action even if we are not sure there is a problem. One could argue that the costs of fighting global warming are so large that we should not take action until we have clear proof. Often people's opinions of these depend on whether they gain or lose from the costs.
I think that all we can do is make an attempt to not politicise the science, and listen to the scientist's conclusions. Having non-scientists state opinions about the data and analysis just adds to the confusion. Science is HARD - not really a good place for non-experts. (would you want a non-expert performing heart surgery or flying an airliner?). If you decide you can't trust the scientists - I think you are just screwed - who could you trust instead?
There are a whole list of things that are legal that a reasonable person might want to hide.
Purchasing habits that might allow vendors to sell products at higher prices: If it were discovered that I do not comparison shop well, I could find all of my online purchases becoming more expensive (eg. I would not receive "special offers" for lower prices).
An interest in a criminal activity is not the same as committing the criminal act: I might want to read about terrorist techniques even if I have no interest in committing terrorism my self. I might want to use this information to make a legally protected political statement about my government's anti-terrorism policies
Medical information can be embarrassing: If I shop for viagra or adult diapers, I don't want that information available to the public
Searches can imply a connection that isn't real: I once searched for Uranium, Lithium Hydride and high explosives in the same day. They were for 3 unrelated legitimate projects, I was not trying to build a hydrogen bomb.
Searches that trigger a police investigation can cause significant hardship: The police can confiscate computers and all copies of your data for years on suspicion of illegal activities. Data mining of vast numbers of searches can result in false investigations.
Business searches can reveal strategies that should be private. If my people at my digital camera R+D facility start searching for information on bluetooth a competitor might realize that I was working on a product that had bluetooth connectivity, and beat me to a product announcement.
Political searches can reveal strategies that should be private: If a political candidate's office starts searching for information on lumber mills and employment in some city, it might indicate the sort of campaign strategy he is planning.
Personal lifestyles can be embarrassing: It is perfectly legal for a man to dress as little-bo-peep in the privacy of his home, but he might not want he searches for "little bo peep costume in XXXXXL size" to be public.
Does this allow a fishing expedition? If you are tracking a suspected drug dealer, and based on tracking can place him near the location of an unrelated crime is that admissible in court? Can you you publicly release or threaten to release embarrassing but legal actions deduced from tracking (extra-marital affairs, homosexual activity etc.) in order to coerce a suspect to confess to a crime?
Yes, but you can calculate the time experienced by an accelerating object as long as you do the calculation in an (any) inertial frame. As I understand it, SR is the special case of GR when the metric is flat. As long as you can find a frame where that is true, you can use SR.
You can do the calculation in any frame. The "stationary" observer has a straight world line. The "moving" observer has a curved (or angled) world line. Due to the minus sign in the metric, the straight line is shorter so the "stationary" observer sees more proper (local clock) time.
Special relativity describes the "twin paradox" correctly - the traveler ages less because he has traveled more distance and accumulated less proper time. ds^2 = (dt^2 - dx^2). ds is the time measured by the moving clock, dt and dx are time and position in the original rest frame. You only need general relativity for gravitation or some cases of strong acceleration.
I'm all in favour of experimental results, but FTL information transmission (on macroscopic scales) has such widespread implications for physics that it is mostly likely a sign the theory is wrong. There are a lot of experiments that indicate that the macroscopic structure of space-time matches special relativity. In that system if you have FTL information, you can send information back in time (by choosing a moving frame). That destroys causality, and a lot of the underpinnings of physics.
I'm not saying it is impossible - but it would require tremendous re-write of all known physics. For scientists to consider this, there would need to be a clear practical experiment.
Fermilab is collaborating on the LHC. Also, if the LHC fails it will pretty much be the end of large scale particle physics. Hard to ask for another $10B machine if the last one didn't work. Still - I'm very glad Fermi is supporting LHC.