From what's been reported so far I would expect scalability to be a major problem for use on earth. In space I can see applications, if...
But it's my understanding that there are major problems with the theory used to justify it. (No, I'm not competent to evaluate it, and I know that.) This, however, doesn't mean the effect isn't real, and that is something that can be tested. If it proves out in an unequivocal test (which probably means in a satellite) then the theory can be debugged...or redone. Most things showed up as effects before they were explained, and the first explanations were usually wrong.
While you've got a good point, I think you overstate it. Perpetual motion cannot be proven to be impossible. In fact it appears to exist, just to not be (directly) useful. But the existence may be an illusion, as when you get down to the quantum level it's hard to be certain what's inherent and what's caused by your methods of observation. Still, virtual particles appear to be a kind of perpetual motion. I'm not going to guarantee that there's no way to correlate them, not after we've built Bose-Einstein condensates, which I wouldn't have believed possible.
The thing is, any of these really wild "things" is an incredibly low probability possibility. But we do KNOW the physics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, because of the conflicts between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, so SOME idea that we have classified as "we aren't thinking about that" is correct. But there are so many of that that picking out the correct one is worse than "a needle in a haystack and no magnet". This shows some plausibility, so it needs to be looked at more carefully.
IIUC the current claim is that it's weaker than a good ion rocket, but doesn't require ejection mass. This doesn't indicate a fast propulsion system, but rather one that can run indefinitely off of just sunlight.
If it works it's got lots of good uses. And, if it works, since we don't understand it now, once we do understand it we may be able to improve on it significantly. (There *is* a theory of operation, but I don't believe it. If it's true it implies that our knowledge of physics is a lot worse than I think.)
OK. But we already KNOW that physics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, we've just got no idea of the correct starting point. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are incompatible, and every attempt at reconciling them has failed. But both are accurate everywhere we can test them.
So I'm really hoping this will give us an idea as to where to start the rebuild. I'm just not expecting it.
You need the virtual reality to siphon off energies that could otherwise lead to rebellion. You need AI to provide a consistent administration that will maintain a stable system over hundreds of human generations. You probably need a human figurehead in control, with the AI ensuring that the incorrect orders get carried out, and that all the correct orders get carried out. Probably most government decisions are optional, but we don't know enough about how societies run to be sure of that.
You should assume that it was put there intentionally, because the requirements for getting into that kind of an orbit are quite difficult. Possibly if the object is just a vacuum cremented collection of dust particles you could assume happenstance...it would also be evidence that the area used to be quite dusty.
You are misunderstanding his proposal. The thing is, this is NOT a fast way to get from star to star, it's a way to spread analogous to the way the Polynesians did. You travel only slightly faster than the local drift, because you need to mine it as you go past, but you don't slow down. You are traveling slightly faster (or slower?) than the local drift because you want to be continually getting new resources. In a way it's analogous to filter-feeding like an anemone...but in an area where you need to keep moving because you require a variety of resources, and only occasionally do you encounter a place that could supply all of them. (Then you reproduce and spread some more.)
A society that lived in this way would need to be very stable. It probably requires fusion power reactors, but you might be able to do it with fission. It also requires a compelling virtual reality and a decent AI. And better ion rockets than we currently have. (Not necessarily more powerful so much as able, given electricity, to run on rocks.) It also requires the ability to maintain a nearly closed eco-system for extended periods of time, and to cycle the population through periods of stability and growth as determined by external needs.
That wouldn't work unless the stars were in a stable multi-star system. And even then most of the Lagrangian points are unstable. The Trojan works well, but the others...
Still, you are talking about an orbit around the Lagrangian in a binary system, presumably the L1 point directly between the two stars. It could be stable if you got into it, but getting into it would be a real trick. If you found one it would almost be a guarantee that it was put there intentionally.
How many? My guess is LOTS. You know how there are lots more small stars than large stars... well there's an equation that models that reasonably well as far down as we could expect to detect things. But I see no reason that just because something isn't self luminous it should be less likely to exist, so I expect lots more brown dwarfs than class M red dwarfs, and lots more loose planets than wandering brown dwarfs, and lots more asteroids than planets (and lots more small planets than large planets) and lots more dust than any of the above. In a fairly smooth curve, where your position on the curve reflects the amount of mass you hold, and the divisions between the categories are irrelevant. There are differences between class F stars and class G stars, but the boundaries are artificial.
I acknowledge that there are arguments against this position, but I'm not convinced. I'm no astronomer, but I predicted brown dwarfs before they were accepted, so I've got *some* understanding of what's going on. (Of course, this could be a bit like Bode's law, and be rather circumstantial, but I consider it the simplest hypothesis.)
Only one star is known to have a habitable planet...Sol.
I agree the odds are that it is something other than aliens, but...
Think a bit about how hard it is for us to detect an earth-sized planet. Now imagine trying to do that 95 light-years away. I don't think the lack of a known earth-sized planet should be given ANY weight. You wouldn't expect to know about it even were it present.
Additionally there could be folk there beaming signals to a probe that was approximately in line with us (at the moment), and which was far out from their star and only carried a weak antenna. Unlikely, but possible. Perhaps it's an interstellar probe en-route to their nearest star. Perhaps it uses a light sail. (Why 11 GHz? Perhaps the astronomers were only listening on a narrow frequency band? Perhaps there are dust clouds that filter out the other frequencies? I'm missing too much to be plausible here...maybe their light sail or lasers are optimized for 11GHz for some reason.)
But it's probably local military communications...and good luck getting that released.
Yes, it's used by the military, but the signal is coming from space. So it could be military satellite transmissions. The Kardashev Type II civilization if only if it were a broadcast signal rather than a beamed transmission, but even if it is beamed it implies a more developed civilization than we've got. Of course, they could be only more developed in certain ways...
I, personally, found the web much more useful before it was polluted with the kind of stuff that most commercial sites, explicitly including "news organizations", include.
It's true, in those days I searched using boolean patterns, but without all the extraneous noise I got better answers than I do now with highly refined search engines.
You're wrong, even though your conclusion is right.
Local news is important, but most "news sources" aren't sources, they repeat what the wire services send them. And Google can subscribe to the wire services for a lot less hassle than dealing with every local paper. And I rather expect that the wire services provide translated versions of the news into most European languages, so THAT's not a problem.
This might cause the wire services to devote more effort to local news, of course.
This is a structurally bad answer, but it's the answer that the economics of that law would encourage. It will lead to increased monopolization and homogenization of the news...but laws can do that kind of thing.
Besides, going with US (or other external) sources isn't a defense. You can still be sued to pay them. The actual defense is to go to the wire services and pay them, and I'm rather sure they provide translations in most European languages. (For the rest, work on improving Bablefish.)
Why would they bother? Most "news sources" aren't news originators even at a local level, so just deal directly with the sources, and if the "news sources" want to get back on, charge them for the privilege (plus requiring some rather explicit legal terns).
It's not that they're a monopoly, although they are, it's that they are a natural monopoly, which doesn't require government interference to exist (as a monopoly). If it did, then Bing would be the dominant search engine.
Now there are generally many possible sources for any news story, and Google can choose whichever it wants to choose. If it has to pay it would probably pick AP, Reuters, maybe a couple of others and ignore the rest. Whoops! There go the local news sites. How many people will go to a site that promotes the local high school soccer team? A few. What will the advertisers pay? Not enough to run the site, so it will depend on someone doing it as a hobby. How many sites will be able to pay for an AP and Reuters connection if they aren't indexed by Google? Not many.
So you have a natural monopoly. And making them want to stop indexing you is a fast route to bankruptcy.
Please note that these same arguments apply if you substitute a different search engine for Google. ANY other search engine.
Sorry, but "fair use" within the US only works as a defense if the court agrees with you. Which means you've got to pay for a lawsuit, and you don't get the money back even if you win.
Also, "fair use" within the US is not well-defined, so trying that as your defense is always a crap-shoot (admittedly some cases are clearer than other, but even one measure of music has been found to not fall under fair use).
The real problem is that we can't "you don't represent me" them when they start acting objectionably. Once they get elected, the control is over until the next cycle.
One possible way to combat this would be to make the votes that a politician can wield proportional to the number of people currently signed on to him rather than to someone else...and to make it easy to switch your vote to someone else within, say, half an hour. This has a lot of problems with potential voter fraud, but it would let people dis-empower those who ignored their wishes...possibly before the damage was done.
And that would be quite annoying for me, because I don't have accounts on any of those services. Slashdot, yes, and a few other similar sites, but not "social media sites".
It's not really that simple, and in a restricted market well designed patents can encourage trade secrets to be replaced by a limited monopoly combined with publication in sufficient detail to allow others to replicate the invention.
Unfortunately, that doesn't describe the current situation, where things would be improved if all patents were canceled and declared void and invalid from the beginning.
Also read Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" for an insightful take on copyright law by an author. (Short of it: Copyrights last much too long.)
Both patents and copyrights have a valid place in a good legal system. But the current laws for both are worse than not having any laws about them.
Not even that. If you write the entire body of code, you continue to hold the copyright, and can thus use it and release it under whatever additional licenses you choose. It's only restrictive on your use of other people's code.
Slashdot Mirror
From what's been reported so far I would expect scalability to be a major problem for use on earth. In space I can see applications, if...
But it's my understanding that there are major problems with the theory used to justify it. (No, I'm not competent to evaluate it, and I know that.) This, however, doesn't mean the effect isn't real, and that is something that can be tested. If it proves out in an unequivocal test (which probably means in a satellite) then the theory can be debugged...or redone. Most things showed up as effects before they were explained, and the first explanations were usually wrong.
While you've got a good point, I think you overstate it. Perpetual motion cannot be proven to be impossible. In fact it appears to exist, just to not be (directly) useful. But the existence may be an illusion, as when you get down to the quantum level it's hard to be certain what's inherent and what's caused by your methods of observation. Still, virtual particles appear to be a kind of perpetual motion. I'm not going to guarantee that there's no way to correlate them, not after we've built Bose-Einstein condensates, which I wouldn't have believed possible.
The thing is, any of these really wild "things" is an incredibly low probability possibility. But we do KNOW the physics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, because of the conflicts between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, so SOME idea that we have classified as "we aren't thinking about that" is correct. But there are so many of that that picking out the correct one is worse than "a needle in a haystack and no magnet". This shows some plausibility, so it needs to be looked at more carefully.
IIUC the current claim is that it's weaker than a good ion rocket, but doesn't require ejection mass. This doesn't indicate a fast propulsion system, but rather one that can run indefinitely off of just sunlight.
If it works it's got lots of good uses. And, if it works, since we don't understand it now, once we do understand it we may be able to improve on it significantly. (There *is* a theory of operation, but I don't believe it. If it's true it implies that our knowledge of physics is a lot worse than I think.)
OK. But we already KNOW that physics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, we've just got no idea of the correct starting point. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are incompatible, and every attempt at reconciling them has failed. But both are accurate everywhere we can test them.
So I'm really hoping this will give us an idea as to where to start the rebuild. I'm just not expecting it.
Sorry, FIX last post
...control, with the AI ensuring that the incorrect orders not get carried out...
You need the virtual reality to siphon off energies that could otherwise lead to rebellion. You need AI to provide a consistent administration that will maintain a stable system over hundreds of human generations. You probably need a human figurehead in control, with the AI ensuring that the incorrect orders get carried out, and that all the correct orders get carried out. Probably most government decisions are optional, but we don't know enough about how societies run to be sure of that.
You should assume that it was put there intentionally, because the requirements for getting into that kind of an orbit are quite difficult. Possibly if the object is just a vacuum cremented collection of dust particles you could assume happenstance...it would also be evidence that the area used to be quite dusty.
You are misunderstanding his proposal. The thing is, this is NOT a fast way to get from star to star, it's a way to spread analogous to the way the Polynesians did. You travel only slightly faster than the local drift, because you need to mine it as you go past, but you don't slow down. You are traveling slightly faster (or slower?) than the local drift because you want to be continually getting new resources. In a way it's analogous to filter-feeding like an anemone...but in an area where you need to keep moving because you require a variety of resources, and only occasionally do you encounter a place that could supply all of them. (Then you reproduce and spread some more.)
A society that lived in this way would need to be very stable. It probably requires fusion power reactors, but you might be able to do it with fission. It also requires a compelling virtual reality and a decent AI. And better ion rockets than we currently have. (Not necessarily more powerful so much as able, given electricity, to run on rocks.) It also requires the ability to maintain a nearly closed eco-system for extended periods of time, and to cycle the population through periods of stability and growth as determined by external needs.
That wouldn't work unless the stars were in a stable multi-star system. And even then most of the Lagrangian points are unstable. The Trojan works well, but the others...
Still, you are talking about an orbit around the Lagrangian in a binary system, presumably the L1 point directly between the two stars. It could be stable if you got into it, but getting into it would be a real trick. If you found one it would almost be a guarantee that it was put there intentionally.
How many? My guess is LOTS. You know how there are lots more small stars than large stars... well there's an equation that models that reasonably well as far down as we could expect to detect things. But I see no reason that just because something isn't self luminous it should be less likely to exist, so I expect lots more brown dwarfs than class M red dwarfs, and lots more loose planets than wandering brown dwarfs, and lots more asteroids than planets (and lots more small planets than large planets) and lots more dust than any of the above. In a fairly smooth curve, where your position on the curve reflects the amount of mass you hold, and the divisions between the categories are irrelevant. There are differences between class F stars and class G stars, but the boundaries are artificial.
I acknowledge that there are arguments against this position, but I'm not convinced. I'm no astronomer, but I predicted brown dwarfs before they were accepted, so I've got *some* understanding of what's going on. (Of course, this could be a bit like Bode's law, and be rather circumstantial, but I consider it the simplest hypothesis.)
Only one star is known to have a habitable planet...Sol.
I agree the odds are that it is something other than aliens, but...
Think a bit about how hard it is for us to detect an earth-sized planet. Now imagine trying to do that 95 light-years away. I don't think the lack of a known earth-sized planet should be given ANY weight. You wouldn't expect to know about it even were it present.
Additionally there could be folk there beaming signals to a probe that was approximately in line with us (at the moment), and which was far out from their star and only carried a weak antenna. Unlikely, but possible. Perhaps it's an interstellar probe en-route to their nearest star. Perhaps it uses a light sail. (Why 11 GHz? Perhaps the astronomers were only listening on a narrow frequency band? Perhaps there are dust clouds that filter out the other frequencies? I'm missing too much to be plausible here...maybe their light sail or lasers are optimized for 11GHz for some reason.)
But it's probably local military communications...and good luck getting that released.
Yes, it's used by the military, but the signal is coming from space. So it could be military satellite transmissions. The Kardashev Type II civilization if only if it were a broadcast signal rather than a beamed transmission, but even if it is beamed it implies a more developed civilization than we've got. Of course, they could be only more developed in certain ways...
Given the travel time, I think a round-trip would be safe enough.
I, personally, found the web much more useful before it was polluted with the kind of stuff that most commercial sites, explicitly including "news organizations", include.
It's true, in those days I searched using boolean patterns, but without all the extraneous noise I got better answers than I do now with highly refined search engines.
You're wrong, even though your conclusion is right.
Local news is important, but most "news sources" aren't sources, they repeat what the wire services send them. And Google can subscribe to the wire services for a lot less hassle than dealing with every local paper. And I rather expect that the wire services provide translated versions of the news into most European languages, so THAT's not a problem.
This might cause the wire services to devote more effort to local news, of course.
This is a structurally bad answer, but it's the answer that the economics of that law would encourage. It will lead to increased monopolization and homogenization of the news...but laws can do that kind of thing.
No, but you are required to wear clothing, and people who sell it to you can set their price.
The difference is that selling clothing isn't a natural monopoly, and has only minor network effects.
Besides, going with US (or other external) sources isn't a defense. You can still be sued to pay them. The actual defense is to go to the wire services and pay them, and I'm rather sure they provide translations in most European languages. (For the rest, work on improving Bablefish.)
Why would they bother? Most "news sources" aren't news originators even at a local level, so just deal directly with the sources, and if the "news sources" want to get back on, charge them for the privilege (plus requiring some rather explicit legal terns).
That sounds a lot easier, and legally safer.
It's not that they're a monopoly, although they are, it's that they are a natural monopoly, which doesn't require government interference to exist (as a monopoly). If it did, then Bing would be the dominant search engine.
Now there are generally many possible sources for any news story, and Google can choose whichever it wants to choose. If it has to pay it would probably pick AP, Reuters, maybe a couple of others and ignore the rest. Whoops! There go the local news sites. How many people will go to a site that promotes the local high school soccer team? A few. What will the advertisers pay? Not enough to run the site, so it will depend on someone doing it as a hobby. How many sites will be able to pay for an AP and Reuters connection if they aren't indexed by Google? Not many.
So you have a natural monopoly. And making them want to stop indexing you is a fast route to bankruptcy.
Please note that these same arguments apply if you substitute a different search engine for Google. ANY other search engine.
Sorry, but "fair use" within the US only works as a defense if the court agrees with you. Which means you've got to pay for a lawsuit, and you don't get the money back even if you win.
Also, "fair use" within the US is not well-defined, so trying that as your defense is always a crap-shoot (admittedly some cases are clearer than other, but even one measure of music has been found to not fall under fair use).
The real problem is that we can't "you don't represent me" them when they start acting objectionably. Once they get elected, the control is over until the next cycle.
One possible way to combat this would be to make the votes that a politician can wield proportional to the number of people currently signed on to him rather than to someone else...and to make it easy to switch your vote to someone else within, say, half an hour. This has a lot of problems with potential voter fraud, but it would let people dis-empower those who ignored their wishes...possibly before the damage was done.
And that would be quite annoying for me, because I don't have accounts on any of those services. Slashdot, yes, and a few other similar sites, but not "social media sites".
It's not really that simple, and in a restricted market well designed patents can encourage trade secrets to be replaced by a limited monopoly combined with publication in sufficient detail to allow others to replicate the invention.
Unfortunately, that doesn't describe the current situation, where things would be improved if all patents were canceled and declared void and invalid from the beginning.
Also read Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" for an insightful take on copyright law by an author. (Short of it: Copyrights last much too long.)
Both patents and copyrights have a valid place in a good legal system. But the current laws for both are worse than not having any laws about them.
Not even that. If you write the entire body of code, you continue to hold the copyright, and can thus use it and release it under whatever additional licenses you choose. It's only restrictive on your use of other people's code.
Immersive doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's hands free.