$6 per kilowatt? where the heck do you get that number from?
Lets say we have an electric car that can go 200miles on ~50kwh... (55.5kwh including the inefficiency of charging the battery)
55.5kwh for 200miles = 27750kwh for 100k miles.
Off-peak electrical rates in my area are about $0.07/kwh. So 27750 * 0.07 = $1942.50 per 100k miles.
Add to that lets say $15k for a new battery at 100k miles and you have $16942.50
divide that by the # of kwh consumed and you have ~ $0.17 per kwh including battery replacement costs. Even if the electric car was half as efficient as above, it would still only cost about $0.34 per kwh. (presuming a battery twice as costly and twice the kwh consumption)
During pregnancy none of us remember or were aware of ourselves being developed by unconscious processes of our cells, yet when we reach a certain age a few years after being born we finally become consciously aware of ourselves, before that time anything that would happen to us we would not even feel nor know about, even though we were reacting and engaging our parents, even though we were not conscious of this fact**.
We can't know for certain that a baby lacks a consciousness. We only know that the baby lacks a conscious memory of those experiences until a certain age.
It brings to mind an "anesthetic" that is used in some medical procedures that are very unpleasant. It doesn't actually knock you out... instead it prevents your brain from forming memories of the incident. It is generally used when the patient must be awake to respond to the doctor. In that situation the person is definitely conscious, but after the fact, they feel as though they were knocked out the entire time, since they have no memory of it.
Kinda creepy when you think about it... I mean, you actually had to live through a crappy experience... almost like torture. Yet it is morally ok since you don't remember it.
Exactly. It makes me wonder what the function of consciousness is. As far as I can tell, there is no reason that we couldn't all just be walking around doing everything we currently do, but without any sentience involved. We could all just be very complicated drones that do interesting things. That would be much easier to explain than the situation we have.
That tends to suggest to me that sentience has a purpose for survival. Then again, i guess it could just be a side effect of some other beneficial construct.
Sure, but most people tend to prefer a specific item when they go to a place like a coffee shop. Unless you had never been to a coffee shop before your brain was copied, I'm 99% certain that your copy would be able to make a fairly accurate guess.
I would argue that it would be highly unlikely that the simulated brain will be conscious in any way. We don't have any evidence at all to suggest that it would be. The only entities that we know exhibit consciousness are ourselves, and possibly other mammals or organisms with complex nervous systems, to varying degrees. We know so little about consciousness, that we really have no basis at all to suggest that something without a flesh and blood brain has even a glimmer of consciousness.
For all we know, consciousness could be a an emergent property of some quantum mechanical interactions with adjacent dimensions. Our brain might just enable those interactions to occur in an organized way. If that was the case, you might be able to create a computer simulation that includes those effects, but it would just be just that, a simulation. Since it isn't actually interacting with the other dimensions, it wouldn't be real. Just a shadow, or hologram of consciousness.
But anyway, right now, all is just speculation and thought exercises.
I don't understand why so many people think that it will be possible to upload your consciousness to a computer. In other words not a copy of your consciousness that is indistinguishable from you, but actually you. Maybe the difference is moot from the perspective of others, but personally, I wouldn't want to end up dead when I expected to wake up in my new shiny computer body.
If all you care is that a copy of you lives on, then that is a ridiculously vain ambition.
My own opinion is that if you want eternal life, then it is going to have to come via medical science, not computer science.
Go a step further, say something not very PC in America and you can lose your job, career, and be blackballed for life. Free speech must be free for those we disagree with or it's not really free for any of us.
You are being hypocritical. While anyone has a right to say what they like, you cannot force anyone else to listen to you... IE they can choose not to associate with you if they disagree with what you say.
Except that they really don't need DRM. Sure in their perfect world, no one can listen to copyrighted music without paying something. But that is a fantasy land. They have to work in the real world, where their loyal customers want to pay for music, but not have to deal with any crap when they do. The other people who are getting it for free most likely wouldn't have bought the music anyway.
I agree with you on voluntary compliance. Look at speed limits. They are mostly ignored and people drive at a speed that seems reasonable instead.
Oh come on, it isn't off-topic. reduced power consumption means that a smaller (cheaper) battery can be used to power it. Thus along with other developments (didn't I hear about a roll to roll oled screen manufacturing process a while back?) this could certainly lead to animated packaging... but before that, probably video greeting cards.
It appears that continuous exposure to radiation would still be a no-go, as cell damage is racking up the entire time. This drug just (temporarily?) stops cells from killing themselves due to radiation damage. So even with this drug, you could still incur so much damage that your organs eventually fail.
You've got it backward. The protein halts the cell-death signal, so that you don't have billions of cells all dieing at once... ie: so many that the body can't cope and you die.
Well, if receiving a treatment that prevents me from dieing of radiation sickness (at the cost of increasing my long-term chances of cancer) I think I would choose the treatment.
My understanding is that the bacteria produce ethanol as part of their anaerobic metabolic process.
I can't help being reminded of the large "dead-zones" (low oxygen regions) that have been developing in the ocean. Perhaps these modified bacteria could not compete against normal bacteria in a normal situation, but these dead-zones could possibly level the playing field a bit. What if the normal bacteria is less resistant to ethanol?... If the modified bacteria gained a foothold, and then produced enough ethanol to remove the normal bacteria from their immediate surroundings, then by producing more ethanol, they could potentially expand outward into normal ocean.
Perhaps the above is a long-shot, but if it were true, it wouldn't be easy to put that genie back in the bottle once it gets out.
The author already said that finding which images are similar is not the problem. The problem is finding the highest quality image from those that are similar.
It only has to counteract drag from the VERY thin atmosphere that is present at that altitude. I don't think the power requirements would be particularly high. It would just be a constant gentle nudge.
Without massive breakthroughs in physics a 2 hour perceived travel time is impossible.
If we had a warp drive we could potentially do it.
Alternatively, if we figure out how to negate the mass of spacecraft, it would allow mind-numbing acceleration, so that we could travel close to the speed of light for most of the trip.
A third option, if we could master the physics of quantum tunneling, would be to simply instantly pop from Earth to Mars, without actually traveling the intervening space.
But I wouldn't bet on any of those becoming reality.
That may be true. Unfortunately there isn't another identical (with the exception that it contains no humans) Earth floating around to compare to, so there is no way to have a control. And the data sets are getting better as time goes on. You have to work with what you've got.
Slashdot Mirror
$6 per kilowatt? where the heck do you get that number from?
Lets say we have an electric car that can go 200miles on ~50kwh... (55.5kwh including the inefficiency of charging the battery)
55.5kwh for 200miles = 27750kwh for 100k miles.
Off-peak electrical rates in my area are about $0.07/kwh. So 27750 * 0.07 = $1942.50 per 100k miles.
Add to that lets say $15k for a new battery at 100k miles and you have $16942.50
divide that by the # of kwh consumed and you have ~ $0.17 per kwh including battery replacement costs. Even if the electric car was half as efficient as above, it would still only cost about $0.34 per kwh. (presuming a battery twice as costly and twice the kwh consumption)
Watts per mile makes no sense. Did you mean watt-hours per mile? Also, at what speed?
I could be wrong, but isn't that well beyond the maximum theoretical efficiency of an otto cycle engine?
During pregnancy none of us remember or were aware of ourselves being developed by unconscious processes of our cells, yet when we reach a certain age a few years after being born we finally become consciously aware of ourselves, before that time anything that would happen to us we would not even feel nor know about, even though we were reacting and engaging our parents, even though we were not conscious of this fact**.
We can't know for certain that a baby lacks a consciousness. We only know that the baby lacks a conscious memory of those experiences until a certain age.
It brings to mind an "anesthetic" that is used in some medical procedures that are very unpleasant. It doesn't actually knock you out... instead it prevents your brain from forming memories of the incident. It is generally used when the patient must be awake to respond to the doctor. In that situation the person is definitely conscious, but after the fact, they feel as though they were knocked out the entire time, since they have no memory of it.
Kinda creepy when you think about it... I mean, you actually had to live through a crappy experience... almost like torture. Yet it is morally ok since you don't remember it.
Exactly. It makes me wonder what the function of consciousness is. As far as I can tell, there is no reason that we couldn't all just be walking around doing everything we currently do, but without any sentience involved. We could all just be very complicated drones that do interesting things. That would be much easier to explain than the situation we have.
That tends to suggest to me that sentience has a purpose for survival. Then again, i guess it could just be a side effect of some other beneficial construct.
Sure, but most people tend to prefer a specific item when they go to a place like a coffee shop. Unless you had never been to a coffee shop before your brain was copied, I'm 99% certain that your copy would be able to make a fairly accurate guess.
I would argue that it would be highly unlikely that the simulated brain will be conscious in any way. We don't have any evidence at all to suggest that it would be. The only entities that we know exhibit consciousness are ourselves, and possibly other mammals or organisms with complex nervous systems, to varying degrees. We know so little about consciousness, that we really have no basis at all to suggest that something without a flesh and blood brain has even a glimmer of consciousness.
For all we know, consciousness could be a an emergent property of some quantum mechanical interactions with adjacent dimensions. Our brain might just enable those interactions to occur in an organized way. If that was the case, you might be able to create a computer simulation that includes those effects, but it would just be just that, a simulation. Since it isn't actually interacting with the other dimensions, it wouldn't be real. Just a shadow, or hologram of consciousness.
But anyway, right now, all is just speculation and thought exercises.
who is Brain?
I don't understand why so many people think that it will be possible to upload your consciousness to a computer. In other words not a copy of your consciousness that is indistinguishable from you, but actually you. Maybe the difference is moot from the perspective of others, but personally, I wouldn't want to end up dead when I expected to wake up in my new shiny computer body.
If all you care is that a copy of you lives on, then that is a ridiculously vain ambition.
My own opinion is that if you want eternal life, then it is going to have to come via medical science, not computer science.
Go a step further, say something not very PC in America and you can lose your job, career, and be blackballed for life. Free speech must be free for those we disagree with or it's not really free for any of us.
You are being hypocritical. While anyone has a right to say what they like, you cannot force anyone else to listen to you... IE they can choose not to associate with you if they disagree with what you say.
Except that they really don't need DRM. Sure in their perfect world, no one can listen to copyrighted music without paying something. But that is a fantasy land. They have to work in the real world, where their loyal customers want to pay for music, but not have to deal with any crap when they do. The other people who are getting it for free most likely wouldn't have bought the music anyway.
I agree with you on voluntary compliance. Look at speed limits. They are mostly ignored and people drive at a speed that seems reasonable instead.
Oh come on, it isn't off-topic. reduced power consumption means that a smaller (cheaper) battery can be used to power it. Thus along with other developments (didn't I hear about a roll to roll oled screen manufacturing process a while back?) this could certainly lead to animated packaging... but before that, probably video greeting cards.
It appears that continuous exposure to radiation would still be a no-go, as cell damage is racking up the entire time. This drug just (temporarily?) stops cells from killing themselves due to radiation damage. So even with this drug, you could still incur so much damage that your organs eventually fail.
You've got it backward. The protein halts the cell-death signal, so that you don't have billions of cells all dieing at once... ie: so many that the body can't cope and you die.
Well, if receiving a treatment that prevents me from dieing of radiation sickness (at the cost of increasing my long-term chances of cancer) I think I would choose the treatment.
And we're one step closer to animated cereal boxes...
Oh joy.
[sarcasm]
Yeah... warming up all of that atmosphere that exists on the moon...
[/sarcasm]
So THAT'S what happened to the martians!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=perchlorate-found-on-mars-makes-soi-2008-08-04
My understanding is that the bacteria produce ethanol as part of their anaerobic metabolic process.
I can't help being reminded of the large "dead-zones" (low oxygen regions) that have been developing in the ocean. Perhaps these modified bacteria could not compete against normal bacteria in a normal situation, but these dead-zones could possibly level the playing field a bit. What if the normal bacteria is less resistant to ethanol?... If the modified bacteria gained a foothold, and then produced enough ethanol to remove the normal bacteria from their immediate surroundings, then by producing more ethanol, they could potentially expand outward into normal ocean.
Perhaps the above is a long-shot, but if it were true, it wouldn't be easy to put that genie back in the bottle once it gets out.
The author already said that finding which images are similar is not the problem. The problem is finding the highest quality image from those that are similar.
Yeah like a whistle, I know, but that is never how it is portrayed. Everyone is always just being sucked directly toward the hole.
It only has to counteract drag from the VERY thin atmosphere that is present at that altitude. I don't think the power requirements would be particularly high. It would just be a constant gentle nudge.
Without massive breakthroughs in physics a 2 hour perceived travel time is impossible.
If we had a warp drive we could potentially do it.
Alternatively, if we figure out how to negate the mass of spacecraft, it would allow mind-numbing acceleration, so that we could travel close to the speed of light for most of the trip.
A third option, if we could master the physics of quantum tunneling, would be to simply instantly pop from Earth to Mars, without actually traveling the intervening space.
But I wouldn't bet on any of those becoming reality.
Here you go little troll... have some food.
Sounds like a great deal of climatology.
That may be true. Unfortunately there isn't another identical (with the exception that it contains no humans) Earth floating around to compare to, so there is no way to have a control. And the data sets are getting better as time goes on. You have to work with what you've got.