I think the issue is different. I think it's that in order for the story to feel "long ago", Tolkien gave women relatively small roles, because we all know that long ago, women were profoundly marginalized. It's not sexist to depict this marginalization. It's only sexist if you indicate that you as a narrator somehow find it OK, and Tolkien certainly never did that. There should be nothing immoral about writing a story in a setting where women are unjustly forced into a limited public role. For fuck's sake, that world is, among others, all of Earth's history and most of its present. It just can't be a moral duty to make every fictional world one that is mysteriously free of racism, sexism and other awful prejudices. There is apparently a thought police that says otherwise, but forget them. Some fictional worlds should be allowed to suck, and one of the ways in which they suck is that their inhabitants hold unsupportable prejudices. If these prejudices disproportionally prevent many old people, or small people, or gay people, or female people from playing a prominent role in that world's history, that doesn't make the telling of that story sexist.
I wonder if the technology could be scaled up, so that we could built a gigantic version of one of these on some tall mountain near the equator (for an extra boost from Earth rotation), and shoot stuff into orbit. "Stuff" could include packages of slabs for a proper space station (to be welded together by robots in space), food and water for inhabitants, shielding material, etc. Even if the g forces would be harsh, there is all kinds of stuff that we want to get into space that would easily survive high g forces.
I have a feeling that as soon as helium got expensive, we'd suddenly have all kinds of good ideas about how to recycle it more effectively. I mean, it's a noble gas, it's not like it gets "used up" in any medical or industrial application! I know it can escape through even the smallest cracks, but it doesn't seem so hard to build some kind of secondary containment around medical imaging machines. Separating helium from air is trivially easy with a gas centrifuge. This could probably be done on site.
Wrong: The next extension will be education. If it can ace the test - and I'm assuming it's a test where you have to show your work and are graded on this - then it can also tutor someone who is learning the material. Can you imagine what a great study tool that would be?
This is a pretty cool idea! Tutors from all over the world could compete with one another, and I bet the quality to cost ratio would be pretty good, better than what you get from college nowadays. The only problem I see is that fair exams would be very hard to make, because the most popular tutors would be the ones who unscrupulously feed you the answers without helping you get a deep understanding of the subject. This would work best in a European-style setting, where all the important exams are oral. On an oral test, you can pretty quickly distinguish people who have learned to say the answers from people who really get the material.
I agree. Scientists are getting good at keeping a human zygote growing outside of a womb, and we're getting good at designing incubators for very premature babies. At some point, these two technologies will converge and we really will have our artificial womb. I think this is likely to happen before the end of the century, and will have important terrestrial applications as well (like the near obsolescence of abortion). Even more technologically interesting would be to design AI parents that can do a decent job in raising and educating the children thus born, while running and keeping in repair all the essential systems in the spaceship. I think this will happen pretty soon, and it will have very important terrestrial applications as well. Then there are all sorts of very interesting social questions to settle: Since we'd be starting clean, what language should the children speak? English, Mandarin, or something logically "cleaner"? What historical information should they have? Should they be indoctrinated in a religion? If so, which one? Should they be indoctrinated in a system of rituals that includes things like Christmas and Halloween? And if so, what kind of calendar should they use? And whose genetic material will we be sending? That of our smartest people? Our nicest? Our healthiest? Most ambitious?
All of these tools can and probably will be built outside of any space agency budget, and will probably be realized before we get anything like feasible interstellar propulsion. If these things are easier to design than the propulsion system itself, I think we should be planning our interstellar missions to be of the "frozen embryos" variety. I have no idea about the lifespan of frozen embryos under optimal conditions. Online, I've read that "Studies done in the 1970’s, exposing frozen mouse embryos to the equivalent of 2,000 years of background radiation, showed no measurable mutagenic effects in offspring." (link) Granted, despite our best shielding, we probably would expose the embryos to a higher radiation dose than terrestrial background. Still, if the ship can travel intact for centuries, that allows us to launch the mission while the propulsion system is still rather primitive, like H-bombs. If it turns out that such long trips would result in inevitable genetic degradation, we might just ship genetic codes written out in redundant computer memory, and a machine that can construct the DNA sequence from amino acids once the ship arrives.
I have three reasons to like this kind of an interstellar colonization plan. First: It will probably be the first sort of ship that's ready to launch, and so the most likely to beat any possible terrestrial sterilizing catastrophe. It would be slow, and if all goes well, it would be overtaken by later, faster ships. But it's good insurance, in case a catastrophe preempts the later ships. Second: The most interesting aspects of the required technology can be motivated independently. They would serve us well not just for interstellar colonization. If we build an AI that can animate robots good enough to teach kids how to grow up to be good people, we would surely find ways to use it here on Earth as well. Ditto for artificial wombs, autonomous asteroid mining robots, etc. Third: This gives us a chance to really start clean, because no social and historical baggage needs to travel with the colonists. If it were living people that were sent on a space ship, even if they were expected to die en route, it would be these people that inevitably transmit their culture to the next generation, and so on. But if the kids were raised by an AI, we get a chance to think hard about which values we as humanity are most proud of, and what we would most want to transmit to a new, distant human society. And simply the opportunity to have this conversation here on Earth would be incredibly interesting.
Let's not forget that ships and planes have regular maintenance. This is a huge portion of the DoD budget. But nobody has taken a wrench or a soldering iron to the Voyagers in 35 years. At best there have been firmware updates.
I totally agree. This is the way to go. The moon is only worth going to if we can start some proper industry up there, and for this we need an industrial-scale power source. I'm picturing this: We mine and smelt lunar metals, press them into beams, and shoot these beams into lunar orbit with a simple rail gun. Once there, robots grab them and weld them into a proper space station, something big enough to rotate and produce artificial gravity. Once the thing is comfy enough, we could use gravity assists to send this thing to travel back and forth between the Earth and Mars, and then we'd be traveling in style (though slowly). That's when space travel will really get going. In space we need to think big, by which I mean: Industrial. The moon is the obvious place to industrialize first. That would be my focus if I ran NASA.
Exactly, and there wouldn't be much point to humans living in some under-ice ocean, just to be able to say "Gee whiz, I'm actually living on Ganymede! Look at me here, living!". There are many more places for us to live under the sea on our own planet. Yes, that sounds stupid, but us living on any other planet - with the possible exception of Mars - would be even more stupid. But there are "sky is falling people" who think we will screw up the Earth, and will only survive as a species if we move to space. To them I want to say that if this is what you're worried about, start an undersea colony. It's orders of magnitude cheaper than a Martian colony, much more likely to be self-sustaining (drawing uranium from seawater, using that for energy and desalination), and will hardly even notice climate change, massive nuclear wars or most meteorite strikes. I think the Beatles had a song about this.
TWR allows us to burn unenriched or even depleted uranium, which is sitting around in huge stockpiles all over the world. Other people have also mentioned liquid thorium, which is a good idea as well. We should start looking past the most primitive and inefficient way to use our fissile fuels. Plus, enrichment is a proliferation risk, as many have noticed.
You basically can't do bomb-level enrichment in complete secret. You have some chance of hiding your bomb program behind a civilian enrichment program, and that's exactly what this fuel bank is supposed to prevent. If it's up and reliable, it takes away any reason for peaceful countries to get uranium centrifuges to begin with.
Exactly! "Quantum" has nothing to do with size, but with discreteness. And the physicist grandparent should know about Bose-Einstein condensates, superconductors, superfluids and other big things that display quantum effects.
Is there a person alive right now who is living a more interesting life than Julien Assange? I'm not calling him a hero or a villain, I'm just saying that I can't think of anyone alive who's actual life would fit so well in a movie thriller.
This was the first answer I thought of. I found it depressing because I realized the scenario is the most plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox, and the whole "a few humans surviving" thing was an empty and implausible veneer of optimism.
I feel sad for this guy, that his creativity is so limited that he can only imagine wanting things that had already existed: Titanic, dinosaurs, giant ferris wheel... Maybe he'll want a copy of Neuswannstein like Disneyland's, or a copy of the Pyramid of Giza and the Statue of Liberty, like Las Vegas. If rich people were... more interesting, maybe we'd like them better!
You're forgetting that the cost of transportation and installation is really quite high compared to the cost of the cells. Then there's all the wiring, and the expensive conversion hocus pocus that you need to safely make the power you generate come out of the socket at 120/60. These fixed costs will bite you in the ass if you skimped on the cells themselves and they're only 5% efficient and barely making a dent in your power bills. To pay back for the total installation costs, the cells really do need to have a decently high efficiency and decently long service lives.
I'm a Democrat, and I love nuclear! (And I conditionally love fracking gas, though I think it needs better - though not onerous - regulations. I certainly love it more than coal, even in its present badly-regulated state.) The leader of my party, President Obama, defends exactly these policies, as far as I can tell. I really don't think that Democrats are the problem. I think that giant energy companies like Exxon-Mobil (the funding arm of the Republican party) are the problem. I think the (Republican) coal lobby is a problem. NIMBYism (which cuts across party lines) is a problem. And science denialism is a problem (on which Republicans have a near monopoly). In all this, it's weird to blame the Democrats.
I don't think you're exactly right about Lomborg. Yes, his first book did try to debunk some of the old evidence that was used to support global warming, but he never defended the positive thesis that global warming isn't happening. OK, maybe that's just the difference between skepticism and denialism. At his worst, Lomborg was a skeptic, and he quit that pretty fast.
The reason why he's so controversial is that even after he declared that the science is in and we are causing real global warming, which will have significant consequences, Lomborg argued that preventing these consequences is economically unfeasible, and the best bang for our buck in planning the future is to concentrate on education, health, sanitation, disease eradication and climate change mitigation. Sadly, critics of Lomborg never seem to engage directly with his arguments. They never present a study that a $Million spent on forest restoration or sewage treatment or micronutrient supplementation will have fewer good consequences than a $Million spent on CO2 emissions reduction. For that reason I remain on the fence, though I do think that Lomborg deserves a more serious hearing.
Sorry to correct you, but the F1 did bounce around all over the place until they found the correct pattern of holes in the injection plate.
This they did by blowing up a lot of engines, and when they did finally find the correct plate, they tested instability by putting an explosive charge and detonating it inside the combustion chamber while the engine was running. The F1 self-stabilized with the correct plate, within 1/10th of a second.
--
BMO
Holy shit, engineers used to kick ass! Would modern computer modeling techniques produce a result that good? I ask because there are always going to be assumptions made in the modeling that don't quite capture every nuance of the physical reality. Maybe some problems with turbulence and other very non-linear phenomena are really better studied with full scale physical models.
Sure, all pleasure is ultimately a neural phenomenon. I'm just saying that the methodology of this experiment - to correlate what happens on the screen with what happens as an immediate result in the brain - will only reveal things that give us pleasure through giving us some kind of rush. Or do you think that this technique could reveal what's good about the novels of Dostoyevsky?
And suppose that you measured the brain of someone who was deeply moved by p. 412 of Brothers Karamazov. Then you implant wires into someone else, which will reproduce the identical neural stimulation in the person who never read the book. You wouldn't say that the two people both receive the same pleasure but from different causes, would you? In general, I'd say that a good novel aims to give us insight, and that insight happens to be pleasant. This neuro technique presupposes that you accomplish what you want by just skipping the insight and going straight to the rush of pleasure that insight causes. So I was saying that this presupposes a pretty impoverished understanding about what experiences are worth having.
Props to Romania for being the sort of country in which a politician's status rises through having a Ph.D. It sucks this guy faked it, but the fact that he felt it would benefit him enough for the faking to be worth it, that's a calculation that no US politician would make. In fact, I think that if a candidate with a Ph.D. ran for congress, the fact would be featured more in attack ads than in personal bios. ["Candidate A may have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, but does she understand the concerns of ordinary people like me and my family? She's not (stupid) like us, she's one of those elites who has no idea what matters to real people! etc."]
Geez, if all you expect from games is to be shown stimuli that trigger pleasure receptors, that's a very impoverished idea of what games could be! Imagine if someone wrote the MRI-perfect novel, so that every page would trigger some neural activity in the pleasure center. Would that even be a good book? I'll answer that rhetorical question: No, it would be a completely pointless, manipulative piece of shit. That happens to describe too many video games already; I don't want this to get even worse. If all we are after is some sort of specific neural stimulation, why don't we just do it directly with wires and be done with it? But, fuck that. I'd rather read an interesting book.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the issue is different. I think it's that in order for the story to feel "long ago", Tolkien gave women relatively small roles, because we all know that long ago, women were profoundly marginalized. It's not sexist to depict this marginalization. It's only sexist if you indicate that you as a narrator somehow find it OK, and Tolkien certainly never did that. There should be nothing immoral about writing a story in a setting where women are unjustly forced into a limited public role. For fuck's sake, that world is, among others, all of Earth's history and most of its present. It just can't be a moral duty to make every fictional world one that is mysteriously free of racism, sexism and other awful prejudices. There is apparently a thought police that says otherwise, but forget them. Some fictional worlds should be allowed to suck, and one of the ways in which they suck is that their inhabitants hold unsupportable prejudices. If these prejudices disproportionally prevent many old people, or small people, or gay people, or female people from playing a prominent role in that world's history, that doesn't make the telling of that story sexist.
I wonder if the technology could be scaled up, so that we could built a gigantic version of one of these on some tall mountain near the equator (for an extra boost from Earth rotation), and shoot stuff into orbit. "Stuff" could include packages of slabs for a proper space station (to be welded together by robots in space), food and water for inhabitants, shielding material, etc. Even if the g forces would be harsh, there is all kinds of stuff that we want to get into space that would easily survive high g forces.
I have a feeling that as soon as helium got expensive, we'd suddenly have all kinds of good ideas about how to recycle it more effectively. I mean, it's a noble gas, it's not like it gets "used up" in any medical or industrial application! I know it can escape through even the smallest cracks, but it doesn't seem so hard to build some kind of secondary containment around medical imaging machines. Separating helium from air is trivially easy with a gas centrifuge. This could probably be done on site.
Wrong: The next extension will be education. If it can ace the test - and I'm assuming it's a test where you have to show your work and are graded on this - then it can also tutor someone who is learning the material. Can you imagine what a great study tool that would be?
This is a pretty cool idea! Tutors from all over the world could compete with one another, and I bet the quality to cost ratio would be pretty good, better than what you get from college nowadays. The only problem I see is that fair exams would be very hard to make, because the most popular tutors would be the ones who unscrupulously feed you the answers without helping you get a deep understanding of the subject. This would work best in a European-style setting, where all the important exams are oral. On an oral test, you can pretty quickly distinguish people who have learned to say the answers from people who really get the material.
Wow, if Korea turned against evolution, how would Zerg do their upgrades?
I agree. Scientists are getting good at keeping a human zygote growing outside of a womb, and we're getting good at designing incubators for very premature babies. At some point, these two technologies will converge and we really will have our artificial womb. I think this is likely to happen before the end of the century, and will have important terrestrial applications as well (like the near obsolescence of abortion). Even more technologically interesting would be to design AI parents that can do a decent job in raising and educating the children thus born, while running and keeping in repair all the essential systems in the spaceship. I think this will happen pretty soon, and it will have very important terrestrial applications as well. Then there are all sorts of very interesting social questions to settle: Since we'd be starting clean, what language should the children speak? English, Mandarin, or something logically "cleaner"? What historical information should they have? Should they be indoctrinated in a religion? If so, which one? Should they be indoctrinated in a system of rituals that includes things like Christmas and Halloween? And if so, what kind of calendar should they use? And whose genetic material will we be sending? That of our smartest people? Our nicest? Our healthiest? Most ambitious?
All of these tools can and probably will be built outside of any space agency budget, and will probably be realized before we get anything like feasible interstellar propulsion. If these things are easier to design than the propulsion system itself, I think we should be planning our interstellar missions to be of the "frozen embryos" variety. I have no idea about the lifespan of frozen embryos under optimal conditions. Online, I've read that "Studies done in the 1970’s, exposing frozen mouse embryos to the equivalent of 2,000 years of background radiation, showed no measurable mutagenic effects in offspring." (link) Granted, despite our best shielding, we probably would expose the embryos to a higher radiation dose than terrestrial background. Still, if the ship can travel intact for centuries, that allows us to launch the mission while the propulsion system is still rather primitive, like H-bombs. If it turns out that such long trips would result in inevitable genetic degradation, we might just ship genetic codes written out in redundant computer memory, and a machine that can construct the DNA sequence from amino acids once the ship arrives.
I have three reasons to like this kind of an interstellar colonization plan. First: It will probably be the first sort of ship that's ready to launch, and so the most likely to beat any possible terrestrial sterilizing catastrophe. It would be slow, and if all goes well, it would be overtaken by later, faster ships. But it's good insurance, in case a catastrophe preempts the later ships. Second: The most interesting aspects of the required technology can be motivated independently. They would serve us well not just for interstellar colonization. If we build an AI that can animate robots good enough to teach kids how to grow up to be good people, we would surely find ways to use it here on Earth as well. Ditto for artificial wombs, autonomous asteroid mining robots, etc. Third: This gives us a chance to really start clean, because no social and historical baggage needs to travel with the colonists. If it were living people that were sent on a space ship, even if they were expected to die en route, it would be these people that inevitably transmit their culture to the next generation, and so on. But if the kids were raised by an AI, we get a chance to think hard about which values we as humanity are most proud of, and what we would most want to transmit to a new, distant human society. And simply the opportunity to have this conversation here on Earth would be incredibly interesting.
"Busted in the Sword Worlds with a loaded gauss gun!"
Let's not forget that ships and planes have regular maintenance. This is a huge portion of the DoD budget. But nobody has taken a wrench or a soldering iron to the Voyagers in 35 years. At best there have been firmware updates.
I totally agree. This is the way to go. The moon is only worth going to if we can start some proper industry up there, and for this we need an industrial-scale power source. I'm picturing this: We mine and smelt lunar metals, press them into beams, and shoot these beams into lunar orbit with a simple rail gun. Once there, robots grab them and weld them into a proper space station, something big enough to rotate and produce artificial gravity. Once the thing is comfy enough, we could use gravity assists to send this thing to travel back and forth between the Earth and Mars, and then we'd be traveling in style (though slowly). That's when space travel will really get going. In space we need to think big, by which I mean: Industrial. The moon is the obvious place to industrialize first. That would be my focus if I ran NASA.
Exactly, and there wouldn't be much point to humans living in some under-ice ocean, just to be able to say "Gee whiz, I'm actually living on Ganymede! Look at me here, living!". There are many more places for us to live under the sea on our own planet. Yes, that sounds stupid, but us living on any other planet - with the possible exception of Mars - would be even more stupid. But there are "sky is falling people" who think we will screw up the Earth, and will only survive as a species if we move to space. To them I want to say that if this is what you're worried about, start an undersea colony. It's orders of magnitude cheaper than a Martian colony, much more likely to be self-sustaining (drawing uranium from seawater, using that for energy and desalination), and will hardly even notice climate change, massive nuclear wars or most meteorite strikes. I think the Beatles had a song about this.
TWR allows us to burn unenriched or even depleted uranium, which is sitting around in huge stockpiles all over the world. Other people have also mentioned liquid thorium, which is a good idea as well. We should start looking past the most primitive and inefficient way to use our fissile fuels. Plus, enrichment is a proliferation risk, as many have noticed.
You basically can't do bomb-level enrichment in complete secret. You have some chance of hiding your bomb program behind a civilian enrichment program, and that's exactly what this fuel bank is supposed to prevent. If it's up and reliable, it takes away any reason for peaceful countries to get uranium centrifuges to begin with.
Exactly! "Quantum" has nothing to do with size, but with discreteness. And the physicist grandparent should know about Bose-Einstein condensates, superconductors, superfluids and other big things that display quantum effects.
Is there a person alive right now who is living a more interesting life than Julien Assange? I'm not calling him a hero or a villain, I'm just saying that I can't think of anyone alive who's actual life would fit so well in a movie thriller.
This was the first answer I thought of. I found it depressing because I realized the scenario is the most plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox, and the whole "a few humans surviving" thing was an empty and implausible veneer of optimism.
I meant "Disney World".... whatever.
I feel sad for this guy, that his creativity is so limited that he can only imagine wanting things that had already existed: Titanic, dinosaurs, giant ferris wheel... Maybe he'll want a copy of Neuswannstein like Disneyland's, or a copy of the Pyramid of Giza and the Statue of Liberty, like Las Vegas. If rich people were ... more interesting, maybe we'd like them better!
You're forgetting that the cost of transportation and installation is really quite high compared to the cost of the cells. Then there's all the wiring, and the expensive conversion hocus pocus that you need to safely make the power you generate come out of the socket at 120/60. These fixed costs will bite you in the ass if you skimped on the cells themselves and they're only 5% efficient and barely making a dent in your power bills. To pay back for the total installation costs, the cells really do need to have a decently high efficiency and decently long service lives.
I'm a Democrat, and I love nuclear! (And I conditionally love fracking gas, though I think it needs better - though not onerous - regulations. I certainly love it more than coal, even in its present badly-regulated state.) The leader of my party, President Obama, defends exactly these policies, as far as I can tell. I really don't think that Democrats are the problem. I think that giant energy companies like Exxon-Mobil (the funding arm of the Republican party) are the problem. I think the (Republican) coal lobby is a problem. NIMBYism (which cuts across party lines) is a problem. And science denialism is a problem (on which Republicans have a near monopoly). In all this, it's weird to blame the Democrats.
I don't think you're exactly right about Lomborg. Yes, his first book did try to debunk some of the old evidence that was used to support global warming, but he never defended the positive thesis that global warming isn't happening. OK, maybe that's just the difference between skepticism and denialism. At his worst, Lomborg was a skeptic, and he quit that pretty fast.
The reason why he's so controversial is that even after he declared that the science is in and we are causing real global warming, which will have significant consequences, Lomborg argued that preventing these consequences is economically unfeasible, and the best bang for our buck in planning the future is to concentrate on education, health, sanitation, disease eradication and climate change mitigation. Sadly, critics of Lomborg never seem to engage directly with his arguments. They never present a study that a $Million spent on forest restoration or sewage treatment or micronutrient supplementation will have fewer good consequences than a $Million spent on CO2 emissions reduction. For that reason I remain on the fence, though I do think that Lomborg deserves a more serious hearing.
Sorry to correct you, but the F1 did bounce around all over the place until they found the correct pattern of holes in the injection plate.
This they did by blowing up a lot of engines, and when they did finally find the correct plate, they tested instability by putting an explosive charge and detonating it inside the combustion chamber while the engine was running. The F1 self-stabilized with the correct plate, within 1/10th of a second.
-- BMO
Holy shit, engineers used to kick ass! Would modern computer modeling techniques produce a result that good? I ask because there are always going to be assumptions made in the modeling that don't quite capture every nuance of the physical reality. Maybe some problems with turbulence and other very non-linear phenomena are really better studied with full scale physical models.
Sure, all pleasure is ultimately a neural phenomenon. I'm just saying that the methodology of this experiment - to correlate what happens on the screen with what happens as an immediate result in the brain - will only reveal things that give us pleasure through giving us some kind of rush. Or do you think that this technique could reveal what's good about the novels of Dostoyevsky?
And suppose that you measured the brain of someone who was deeply moved by p. 412 of Brothers Karamazov. Then you implant wires into someone else, which will reproduce the identical neural stimulation in the person who never read the book. You wouldn't say that the two people both receive the same pleasure but from different causes, would you? In general, I'd say that a good novel aims to give us insight, and that insight happens to be pleasant. This neuro technique presupposes that you accomplish what you want by just skipping the insight and going straight to the rush of pleasure that insight causes. So I was saying that this presupposes a pretty impoverished understanding about what experiences are worth having.
Props to Romania for being the sort of country in which a politician's status rises through having a Ph.D. It sucks this guy faked it, but the fact that he felt it would benefit him enough for the faking to be worth it, that's a calculation that no US politician would make. In fact, I think that if a candidate with a Ph.D. ran for congress, the fact would be featured more in attack ads than in personal bios. ["Candidate A may have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, but does she understand the concerns of ordinary people like me and my family? She's not (stupid) like us, she's one of those elites who has no idea what matters to real people! etc."]
Geez, if all you expect from games is to be shown stimuli that trigger pleasure receptors, that's a very impoverished idea of what games could be! Imagine if someone wrote the MRI-perfect novel, so that every page would trigger some neural activity in the pleasure center. Would that even be a good book? I'll answer that rhetorical question: No, it would be a completely pointless, manipulative piece of shit. That happens to describe too many video games already; I don't want this to get even worse. If all we are after is some sort of specific neural stimulation, why don't we just do it directly with wires and be done with it? But, fuck that. I'd rather read an interesting book.