At what stage of their service life? And what *is* their service life?
In neither the case of gasoline power vehicles nor of electric powered vehicles do we normally know the external costs. And electrics (as currently designed) are so new that we don't have a good handle on battery life. Also, Lithium is *quite* polluting to extract from ores. A carbon based battery would be quite desired. (Here I'm really thinking about graphene based super-capacitors, but I don't want to tie myself down, as anything based around Carbon, Hydorgen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen would be desireable if it were efficient enough, powerful enough, etc.)
FWIW, batteries are currently hazerdous waste for a reason. And the recycling of hazerdous waste is not done well (though MUCH better than it used to be). OTOH, recycling of car batteries will probably be much more thorough, if only because more will be recycled at a time. But there will need to be careful watching to ensure that corners aren't cut.
You were rather vague about just what you were complaining about, but from context I presume it to be GUI. Probably Gnome3. If so I certainly agree, but it doesn't have much to do with the kernel.
OTOH, there was a time when the scheduler varied a lot between releases. That seems to have stabilized, though, over a year ago. Otherwise, I can't guess what you are talking about.
(FWIW, there was a C library change a few years ago that broke some games I have installed. So I run them on a virtual machine. It's annoying, but what can you expect of proprietary software.... It's not like Loki is around anymore for me to complain to.)
You left out the Deists, who believe that God created the universe and left it to evolve. (IIRC they never actually said that God created life, and they didn't talk about evolution, but then they were prominent before Darwin.)
OTOH, I'm not sure how many Diests are around anymore.
IIUC, Voyager I has long outlasted it's expected lifetime. (But I don't think that this looks like equipment failure. It's just that that's not a stupid argument.)
FWIW, I'm not sure that we can currently build things as durable as Voyager was. The circuits have gotten smaller, faster, and less power hungry...but that's not the same as durable at all. If you want durable there's a lot to be said for thick leads, e.g. And we haven't been keeping our skills up in that area. (Anything local and it's cheaper to replace it with something smaller and faster that does the same job with less power drain.)
Schools are one of Apple's traditional strongholds. Personally, this sounds a lot poorer than did the Apple ][, OTOH, it's a lot cheaper...except that it's one/student instead of one/classroom.
I *do* find the approach disgusting, but not surprising. And no worse than weekly standardized tests. (If it replaces them, it might even be an improvement.)
Probably not, but the entire system has been so corrupted by plea bargaining that I wouldn't actually be surprised. I'll agree that it's stupid and silly, but when there are enough stupid and silly laws, and adverse incentives, then all sorts of stupid and silly things happen. As well as all sorts of malicious and brutal things.
Plea bargaining should be totally ripped out of the system. It is a vile corruption. And it is one of the factors in causing a huge number of vile laws. (Not that I think it's a major factor, just one of them. Legislators don't normally think about plea bargaining, but it's a part of the background environment. Did you know that conspiracy to JayWalk is a felony? It is where I live (unless JayWalking has been reduced from a misdemeanor to an infraction).
Doesn't work that way. Natural selection appears to perfer to maintain homosexual preferences at as species dependent level (at least amoung mammals). And the leve doesn't appear to ever be 0%. Guesses about why are many, but I'm aware of no successful proof of any of them. (Among humans one guess is that single uncles are more supportive of their sisters children. I have my doubts that this factor is currently significant, but it could have been historicly important.)
P.S.: Natural selection is often a very slow process, when multiple genes are involved. My best guess is that homosexuality is, indeed, a process in which numerous genes are involved, and that many of them are adaptationally useful. Note that Kinsey measured many degrees of homosexuallity, ranging from totally homosexual to never homosexual, but with many (9?) shades inbetween. (If the number was nine, that's an artifact of his measurement tool, and not to be taken as otherwise significant.)
Read "The Best of John W. Campbell" (or, possibly, "The Best Short Stories of John W. Campbell". Every one of them is a story where there is no, or next-to-no, anti-science theme present.
The reason that we get the same hackneyed theme over and over again is that producers buy that same theme, suitably repacked, in preference to alternative themes. Even when they buy the right to use a decent story they frequently (usually?) so pervert it's basic story line that it ends up falling in the standard groove.
I have given up watching movies because I've been so disgusted every time I have done so.
OTOH, "I Love Lucy" ran for decades based around essentially the same formula for most of the shows. And it was one of the most popular shows on TV. So my tastes are clearly not those of the majority. But don't blame the crappy selection on the lack of options. Plenty of options exist. A plethora of options. But producers don't choose to produce much of anything else. Just like (IIUC) most games are currently first-person shooters. It's not that no other games are possible, or even exist. It's what is easy to build, and fairly certain to sell. (As a counter example, I still prefer to play Alpha Centuari alternating with Civilization: Call To Power [both from Loki] over any moder game with which I am familiar, baring a couple of variations of solitaire. I prefer this to such an extent that I keep a virtual machine around purely for the purpose of playing those games. [They won't play on a modern Linux system due to system library incompatibilities.])
Given his examples, his comments don't apply to science fiction, but only to Super-Hero comics and hollywood movies. And for those genres it's correct. Perhaps there are print works on the same theme, that aren't takeoffs on the comics or movies, but I've never encountered one.
OTOH, Science Fiction, or even Science Fantasy, seems to be a dying genre. Fantasy has more or less killed it and swallowed it whole. (I will admit that even at the top of it's form there was an awful lot of Space Opera that was disguising itself as Science Fiction, and at other periods there was an immense amount of Jingoism and Militarism, though that often actually blended into a real Science Fiction story.
To me Science Fiction is epitomized by E.E.Smith, Cordwainer Smith, Hal Clement, and Isaac Asimov. There were others, of course. And note that it was shaped and driven by one person: John W. Campbell, Jr., as editor of Astounding/Analog. It pretty much collapsed under the weight of the "New Wave" where style and characterization triumphed over substance. Some or Charles Stross' works are Science Fiction in this sense. So, IIUC, though I've never read them, are some of Neal Stephanson's works. So it's not dead. Stross' "Halting State" is a good example of extremely good Science Fiction.
OTOH, most fantasy in it's reincarnation since around 1990 or a bit earlier, is much more "scientific" than the versions were that existed in the 1930's or earlier. There are logical rules for what works. If there are all powerful entities that are ruling things, either they remain off stage, or they are humanized. Even if they are off stage, they are no more inscrutable than is a corporation. Usually they are more predicatable than are the human characters. Compare this with Lovecraft or Dunsay. (OTOH, it's not that different than Mallory [Le Morte de Artur], though the mood is generally less implacable.)
P.S.: Do note that Science Fiction always had the accent on Fiction. Even the hardest of hard Science Fiction tended to do so. Actually, I suspect that Stross' "Halting State" is the hardest Science Fiction ever written. An argument could be made for "When Worlds Collide", but that would need to be based on the lack of knowledge when it was written. This justifiable, but I still feel that "Halting State" is a better example. For one thing several of it's "predictions" have already come true. (Prediction is in quotes because actually stories aren't making predictions, they are taking plausible possibilities and presuming that they have occurred, as a device to allow one to more easily suspend disbelief. If they really are high probability occurrences, then it's not too surprising if some of them happen.)
P.P.S.: Partially this is to answer another respondent to you who accused you of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I was demonstrating that I *do* know and recognize actual Science Fiction, as well as some associated genres.
Sorry, but it's not that simple. Many forms of alternative medicine often work, but the problem is in diagnosis. And most of the practitioners are not skilled enough to tell when to send the patient to someone with a different specialty.
Also, there are still some medical problems for which there is no solution.
Non-alternative medicine is both better at detecting when there is a need to refer the patient to a specialist in a different area and in insulating the practitioner from blame when things go wrong. But this doesn't mean that many forms of alternative medicine don't have a fairly high success rate. In fact, it has recently been proven that, e.g., many anti-depressant pills have no greater success rate than does a placebo, but they have much worse side-effects.
I will grant that this *incorrect* use is very common, but there's usually an at least implicit understanding that "C+D" applies is common knowledge. This thing about the "fruitarian diet" is the first I've ever heard of it...and apparently it took place decades ago and was not maintained (if I'm understanding the proposal correctly), so it's an unreasonable supposition that it would be common knowledge.
P.S.: I'm also not aware of any studies that show that a "fruitarian diet" leads to pancreatic cancer. I'd be more inclined to suspect barbequed ribs or bacon. High temperature cooking of fatty meat in the presence of nitrites (and/or nitrates?) *has* been shown to produce carcinogens. (Not saying that no such studies exist, but if so I sure don't know about them.)
The question isn't so much can life survive in those conditions, as can it originate in those conditions. When a change comes on slowly enough simple life can survive in truely incredible conditions...but could it originate in them?
Of course, answering this question is made more difficult, because we don't know what conditions life originated in even on Earth. We've got lots of reasonable guessses, and perhaps more than one of them is correct (though only one origin left survivors).
Flywheels aren't a really good solution, though better than some. Batteries are better, but not very good. I keep hoping the the "supercapacitor" to move from the lab to market, but so far it isn't happening.
Decent energy storage systems seem to need to be designed for a rather large scale (small town, perhaps) and to take significant maintenance. Also, IIUC, the best of them are around 90% efficient, and 60% is more common, with even lower not being uncommon. (Naturally the best are either specific to local conditions, or are quite expensive. E.g., pumping water uphill is relatively cheap if you have a pond at the top of a hill close-by, but if you need to build the hill and the pond [think water tower] it gets a lot more expensive, though easier to scale to a different size.)
Not sure that you are right, though you certainly used to be.
Cadmium is a truely terrible pollutant (not the worst, but quite bad). But I had heard that it had gotten so expensive that they were now recovering it from the waste. And similarly for many other exotic metals/semi-conductors.
Additionally, if you don't need high efficiency there are rather cheaper solar cells that don't have any of that exotic stuff. They take up more space, and they're less efficient, but they're cheap enough that they're sometimes the best answer...especially if extra shade is an additional benefit. (Of course, nothing really likes high heat, so in really hot places they'll need to be replaced more frequently.
P.S.: If you think Africa is the wrong place for solar, perhaps you have the wrong image. Africa isn't the right place for a large solar plant with lots of wires transmitting power to distant locations. It's an excellent place for a plant sufficient to keep the radios and cell phones of a small village charged, and perhaps to run the cell phone tower. Getting the power lines to that village could be a real job, and somebody might well steal the wires. Putting in a quite small solar plant is trivial by comparison.
Yeah. I can point to unreliable sources claiming everything from global deserts to gobal ice sheets to aliens stealing all our oceans from any decade back through the 1930's. It was probably happening then, too, but I'm just not familiar with the appropriate sources. (But you could read Charles Fort to see what stories the newspapers *were* printing.)
And if you choose an unreliable source, you'll get a faulty prediction. Unfortunately, reliable sources are a bit uncertain about their predictions, and people tend to prefer certainty over reasonableness. I'll grant you that.
N.B.: I can also find claims that dinosaurs walk the earth, that we're going to be invaded from Mars by Martians who look like chambered Nautilus, and many other claims. (I rather miss the "Weekly World News", but the supermarket no longer carries it.)
But I'm not quite sure what your point was:
1) That unreliable sources have been making wild predictions? That's true all the way back to the Sumerians. 2) That people are choosing to believe fraudsters who make confident predictions over people who try to make correct predictions, but are a bit uncertain? That's also been true as far back as is recorded. 3) Something else? Please explain.
Radio, as a media, is designed to present topics and move onto the next without giving you time to evaluate them. Usually I want to turn it off at that point, until I've finished thinking, but if anyone else is present that's considered impolite. So I've gradually come to blatantly dislike radio. I suppose that it's OK for music, for quiz shows. (I do like to listen to "My Word".) But not to any show that tries to present anything serious.
I will agree that radio used to be much less annoying. 30-40 years ago it was often interesting, but either my thought processes slowed down around 30 years ago, or the pace of radio presentation picked up. (I tend to believe that it was that the pace of radio picked up, since it seems that around the same time there was a lot of effort going into speed reading, and processing verbal speech to "enhance clarity" by removing "dead space" (pauses, comments like "um", etc.). But the result was that I stopped listening to radio for anything but music.. And then I just stopped. I started noticing, when my wife picked up radios with speakers, that radio had become a **LOT** more annoying than it used to be, and that the key element in my annoyance was that it never gave me time to think over what was being said, and decide whether or not I believed it.
The timing *does* seem a bit questionable, but unless publishing schedules have changed markedly he must have been planning to make this speech 6 months ago....though I doubt exactly what he was going to say in it was determined until quite recently.
But the magazine article, in, I believe, the Scientific American, speculated that he was going to use this speech to render the KeystoneXL pipeline more acceptable to his supporters. That seems to have held up.
There are a lot of potential answers. Many of them are negative, but some of them are only "sort of" negative. E.g.:
1) The population is plugged into the local analog of the cloud, and doesn't want to put up with the low latency required by interstellar travel.
2) Artificial environments are so much nicer than natural planets, that nobody is interested in them.
3) TV is already one of the more effective suppressers of birth-rate. The internet is a close second. So populations just stop growing. People have more interesting things to do than taking care of kids.
4) An authoritarian government doesn't want to allow colonies to escape to breed rebels. And it's effective. (N.B.: This could be a welfare state, a plutocratic state, or any of various other varieties, and perhaps different planets have different choices.)
5) Perhaps many races can't live in low gravity, or can't stand the stresses of liftoff.
There are, of course, lots of more negative answers, like resource depletion, gray goo, etc. But we don't need to presume that the answer is always the same, or even that we know all the potential reasons yet. I've heard one argument from economics that because of intrest it's impossible for any interstellar colony to ever pay off the costs of founding it. Maybe. Or maybe that's just another hurdle that makes things more difficult. Many species may have a fear of heights or of falling that makes space flight unendurable.
Note that each of these answers only reduces the proportion of races that will engage in interstellar flight....or at least will impinge on us after doing so. And there are many other answers.
Here's another one: We may be among the first generation of planets with enough heavy metals to produce a form of civilization that can lead to space flight.
That said, do note that "super earths" are not a good place to develop spaceflight. The Earth itself is heavier than optimum, but this much gravity may be needed to hold onto viable development conditions. And how important was the moon? Some arguments have held that not only the existence of the moon, but the way that it was captured is crucial. (Note that it stabilizes the Earth's axial tilt.)
So, while I find the Fermi Paradox troubling, I don't find it insoluble.
By all means use a better propulsion system. Ion jet rockets probably are the best currently buildable. But you will still need to limit your top velocity, or you will be damaged by interstellar dust particles. Grain of sand is probably the worst to deal with. Too small to see in time to dodge, and too large to shield against. Of course, if you were going faster even smaller particles would be more dangerous. My guess is that this factor would limit you to 0.1c, but that's a wild guess. I could easily be off by a factor of 10 in either direction.
Perhaps it would help if the vehicle were preceeded by a balloon filled with ice (water). But that's rather hard to see through, and hard to manuver if you need to dodge something too large.
And the more complex you make things, the more likely it is you'll experience a breakdown along the way.
Still, one thing that we really need to do is send one of these things with an on-board telescope of moderate power. Have the ship spin slowly, and stream the pictures back to earth. You don't need a fast transmission rate as one picture/week at any given angle should suffice, and half or a quarter of that would be acceptable. But this would give us a LONG parallax line. (N.B.: I'm not talking about something with high resolution, or infrared capability, and any other exotic capability. I'm presuming that the pictures would be stitched together with software after being received. So the buffer would only need to hold one image at a time.)
Now it's true that this wouldn't show much about the target system within our lifetimes, but it might show us a great deal about things off to the side. And it would test many of our estimates of distance (which, to be frank, rest on reasonable but not directly testable assumptions). That said, even this would only directly test distances about near bodies. It's not a long enough baseline to directly test Cephid variable distances, except a few. And I'm only expecting it to verify what is already known. But it would allow us to test our model of the local 3d starspace against direct imagery.
Verbosity *IS* a problem, though not as bad as sometimes painted. Automatic documentation generation can get around a lot of it, but the documentation itself need to either be compace, or at least have a compact mode, where you can see all the methods in a class on one screen...preferably with brief notes about what they do.
Ada partially solves this with their header files (which are much more readable and useful than C's). But it doesn't handle the documentation problem at all well. (I don't like Doxygen, because it spreads simple things over multiple pages, which defeats half the purpose.) Javadoc works well with some IDEs, because they let you readily access the documentation while you're programming something else. Perhaps there's something similar for Ada that I don't know about.
Verbose code does NOT have a better chance of working better on the first attempt...except sometimes. Being a bit dyslexic I find that my usual problem is getting a logical comparison backwards. Fortunately, verbose unit testing can resolve this. Unfortunately, half the time it turns out that the backwards logic test was in my debugging code. Still, if the errors are caught during testing it's much better than only catching them much later. So my debug tests tend to be quite verbose. Which means I want a language that supports that. (For that, among many other reasons, I currently prefer Digital Mars D [dmd].) But there are other languages that come close, sometimes for other reasons, like having a better supported set of libraries. Python is another language I like, for other reasons. And if Vala would ever get production ready I'd be quite interested in it. (Note that all these languages have decent support for unicode, also. Which is the main reason *I* prefer Python3 over Python2. [Python2 can handle unicode, but it's a bit clumsy, and you had really better not mix the dialects.])
I don't know about Javascript and PHP, but Ruby doesn't require that the code not be clean. Neither does Objective C. And C++ is generally not too bad, until you start using STL. (C++ templates would give me nightmares, except that I switched to more civilized languages. Like Python and D (dmd).
That said, I'd really like to use Smalltalk, but it's too slow, and doesn't work well on a multi-processor system. (Yeah, that's implementation rather than basic language. And much the same criticisms can be leveled at Python and Ruby, but they don't try to insist that you do everything in one language.)
What would be really interesting is a multi-processor version of Vala that was decently documented, but it looks as if it's never going to get as far as a beta release. (Well, it's been 3 months since I last looked, but I've been looking periodically for years.)
It may be a joke, and I know of no reason to believe it, but unless you can prove it didn't/doesn't happen that way you shouldn't close your mind to the possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
At what stage of their service life? And what *is* their service life?
In neither the case of gasoline power vehicles nor of electric powered vehicles do we normally know the external costs. And electrics (as currently designed) are so new that we don't have a good handle on battery life. Also, Lithium is *quite* polluting to extract from ores. A carbon based battery would be quite desired. (Here I'm really thinking about graphene based super-capacitors, but I don't want to tie myself down, as anything based around Carbon, Hydorgen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen would be desireable if it were efficient enough, powerful enough, etc.)
FWIW, batteries are currently hazerdous waste for a reason. And the recycling of hazerdous waste is not done well (though MUCH better than it used to be). OTOH, recycling of car batteries will probably be much more thorough, if only because more will be recycled at a time. But there will need to be careful watching to ensure that corners aren't cut.
You were rather vague about just what you were complaining about, but from context I presume it to be GUI. Probably Gnome3. If so I certainly agree, but it doesn't have much to do with the kernel.
OTOH, there was a time when the scheduler varied a lot between releases. That seems to have stabilized, though, over a year ago. Otherwise, I can't guess what you are talking about.
(FWIW, there was a C library change a few years ago that broke some games I have installed. So I run them on a virtual machine. It's annoying, but what can you expect of proprietary software. ... It's not like Loki is around anymore for me to complain to.)
You clearly aren't an Ubuntu user. Neither am I anymore. (I went back to Debian.)
You left out the Deists, who believe that God created the universe and left it to evolve. (IIRC they never actually said that God created life, and they didn't talk about evolution, but then they were prominent before Darwin.)
OTOH, I'm not sure how many Diests are around anymore.
IIUC, Voyager I has long outlasted it's expected lifetime. (But I don't think that this looks like equipment failure. It's just that that's not a stupid argument.)
FWIW, I'm not sure that we can currently build things as durable as Voyager was. The circuits have gotten smaller, faster, and less power hungry...but that's not the same as durable at all. If you want durable there's a lot to be said for thick leads, e.g. And we haven't been keeping our skills up in that area. (Anything local and it's cheaper to replace it with something smaller and faster that does the same job with less power drain.)
Schools are one of Apple's traditional strongholds. Personally, this sounds a lot poorer than did the Apple ][, OTOH, it's a lot cheaper...except that it's one/student instead of one/classroom.
I *do* find the approach disgusting, but not surprising. And no worse than weekly standardized tests. (If it replaces them, it might even be an improvement.)
Probably not, but the entire system has been so corrupted by plea bargaining that I wouldn't actually be surprised. I'll agree that it's stupid and silly, but when there are enough stupid and silly laws, and adverse incentives, then all sorts of stupid and silly things happen. As well as all sorts of malicious and brutal things.
Plea bargaining should be totally ripped out of the system. It is a vile corruption. And it is one of the factors in causing a huge number of vile laws. (Not that I think it's a major factor, just one of them. Legislators don't normally think about plea bargaining, but it's a part of the background environment. Did you know that conspiracy to JayWalk is a felony? It is where I live (unless JayWalking has been reduced from a misdemeanor to an infraction).
Doesn't work that way. Natural selection appears to perfer to maintain homosexual preferences at as species dependent level (at least amoung mammals). And the leve doesn't appear to ever be 0%. Guesses about why are many, but I'm aware of no successful proof of any of them. (Among humans one guess is that single uncles are more supportive of their sisters children. I have my doubts that this factor is currently significant, but it could have been historicly important.)
P.S.: Natural selection is often a very slow process, when multiple genes are involved. My best guess is that homosexuality is, indeed, a process in which numerous genes are involved, and that many of them are adaptationally useful. Note that Kinsey measured many degrees of homosexuallity, ranging from totally homosexual to never homosexual, but with many (9?) shades inbetween. (If the number was nine, that's an artifact of his measurement tool, and not to be taken as otherwise significant.)
Read "The Best of John W. Campbell" (or, possibly, "The Best Short Stories of John W. Campbell". Every one of them is a story where there is no, or next-to-no, anti-science theme present.
The reason that we get the same hackneyed theme over and over again is that producers buy that same theme, suitably repacked, in preference to alternative themes. Even when they buy the right to use a decent story they frequently (usually?) so pervert it's basic story line that it ends up falling in the standard groove.
I have given up watching movies because I've been so disgusted every time I have done so.
OTOH, "I Love Lucy" ran for decades based around essentially the same formula for most of the shows. And it was one of the most popular shows on TV. So my tastes are clearly not those of the majority. But don't blame the crappy selection on the lack of options. Plenty of options exist. A plethora of options. But producers don't choose to produce much of anything else. Just like (IIUC) most games are currently first-person shooters. It's not that no other games are possible, or even exist. It's what is easy to build, and fairly certain to sell. (As a counter example, I still prefer to play Alpha Centuari alternating with Civilization: Call To Power [both from Loki] over any moder game with which I am familiar, baring a couple of variations of solitaire. I prefer this to such an extent that I keep a virtual machine around purely for the purpose of playing those games. [They won't play on a modern Linux system due to system library incompatibilities.])
Given his examples, his comments don't apply to science fiction, but only to Super-Hero comics and hollywood movies. And for those genres it's correct. Perhaps there are print works on the same theme, that aren't takeoffs on the comics or movies, but I've never encountered one.
OTOH, Science Fiction, or even Science Fantasy, seems to be a dying genre. Fantasy has more or less killed it and swallowed it whole. (I will admit that even at the top of it's form there was an awful lot of Space Opera that was disguising itself as Science Fiction, and at other periods there was an immense amount of Jingoism and Militarism, though that often actually blended into a real Science Fiction story.
To me Science Fiction is epitomized by E.E.Smith, Cordwainer Smith, Hal Clement, and Isaac Asimov. There were others, of course. And note that it was shaped and driven by one person: John W. Campbell, Jr., as editor of Astounding/Analog. It pretty much collapsed under the weight of the "New Wave" where style and characterization triumphed over substance. Some or Charles Stross' works are Science Fiction in this sense. So, IIUC, though I've never read them, are some of Neal Stephanson's works. So it's not dead. Stross' "Halting State" is a good example of extremely good Science Fiction.
OTOH, most fantasy in it's reincarnation since around 1990 or a bit earlier, is much more "scientific" than the versions were that existed in the 1930's or earlier. There are logical rules for what works. If there are all powerful entities that are ruling things, either they remain off stage, or they are humanized. Even if they are off stage, they are no more inscrutable than is a corporation. Usually they are more predicatable than are the human characters. Compare this with Lovecraft or Dunsay. (OTOH, it's not that different than Mallory [Le Morte de Artur], though the mood is generally less implacable.)
P.S.: Do note that Science Fiction always had the accent on Fiction. Even the hardest of hard Science Fiction tended to do so. Actually, I suspect that Stross' "Halting State" is the hardest Science Fiction ever written. An argument could be made for "When Worlds Collide", but that would need to be based on the lack of knowledge when it was written. This justifiable, but I still feel that "Halting State" is a better example. For one thing several of it's "predictions" have already come true. (Prediction is in quotes because actually stories aren't making predictions, they are taking plausible possibilities and presuming that they have occurred, as a device to allow one to more easily suspend disbelief. If they really are high probability occurrences, then it's not too surprising if some of them happen.)
P.P.S.: Partially this is to answer another respondent to you who accused you of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I was demonstrating that I *do* know and recognize actual Science Fiction, as well as some associated genres.
Sorry, but it's not that simple. Many forms of alternative medicine often work, but the problem is in diagnosis. And most of the practitioners are not skilled enough to tell when to send the patient to someone with a different specialty.
Also, there are still some medical problems for which there is no solution.
Non-alternative medicine is both better at detecting when there is a need to refer the patient to a specialist in a different area and in insulating the practitioner from blame when things go wrong. But this doesn't mean that many forms of alternative medicine don't have a fairly high success rate. In fact, it has recently been proven that, e.g., many anti-depressant pills have no greater success rate than does a placebo, but they have much worse side-effects.
Yes.
I will grant that this *incorrect* use is very common, but there's usually an at least implicit understanding that "C+D" applies is common knowledge. This thing about the "fruitarian diet" is the first I've ever heard of it...and apparently it took place decades ago and was not maintained (if I'm understanding the proposal correctly), so it's an unreasonable supposition that it would be common knowledge.
P.S.: I'm also not aware of any studies that show that a "fruitarian diet" leads to pancreatic cancer. I'd be more inclined to suspect barbequed ribs or bacon. High temperature cooking of fatty meat in the presence of nitrites (and/or nitrates?) *has* been shown to produce carcinogens. (Not saying that no such studies exist, but if so I sure don't know about them.)
The question isn't so much can life survive in those conditions, as can it originate in those conditions. When a change comes on slowly enough simple life can survive in truely incredible conditions...but could it originate in them?
Of course, answering this question is made more difficult, because we don't know what conditions life originated in even on Earth. We've got lots of reasonable guessses, and perhaps more than one of them is correct (though only one origin left survivors).
But do note that if new books stop selling, in a few years there won't be any used book stores.
Flywheels aren't a really good solution, though better than some. Batteries are better, but not very good. I keep hoping the the "supercapacitor" to move from the lab to market, but so far it isn't happening.
Decent energy storage systems seem to need to be designed for a rather large scale (small town, perhaps) and to take significant maintenance. Also, IIUC, the best of them are around 90% efficient, and 60% is more common, with even lower not being uncommon. (Naturally the best are either specific to local conditions, or are quite expensive. E.g., pumping water uphill is relatively cheap if you have a pond at the top of a hill close-by, but if you need to build the hill and the pond [think water tower] it gets a lot more expensive, though easier to scale to a different size.)
A lousy choice, but probably still better than the alternative.
I admit that that's the best thing I can say about him, though.
Not sure that you are right, though you certainly used to be.
Cadmium is a truely terrible pollutant (not the worst, but quite bad). But I had heard that it had gotten so expensive that they were now recovering it from the waste. And similarly for many other exotic metals/semi-conductors.
Additionally, if you don't need high efficiency there are rather cheaper solar cells that don't have any of that exotic stuff. They take up more space, and they're less efficient, but they're cheap enough that they're sometimes the best answer...especially if extra shade is an additional benefit. (Of course, nothing really likes high heat, so in really hot places they'll need to be replaced more frequently.
P.S.: If you think Africa is the wrong place for solar, perhaps you have the wrong image. Africa isn't the right place for a large solar plant with lots of wires transmitting power to distant locations. It's an excellent place for a plant sufficient to keep the radios and cell phones of a small village charged, and perhaps to run the cell phone tower. Getting the power lines to that village could be a real job, and somebody might well steal the wires. Putting in a quite small solar plant is trivial by comparison.
Yeah. I can point to unreliable sources claiming everything from global deserts to gobal ice sheets to aliens stealing all our oceans from any decade back through the 1930's. It was probably happening then, too, but I'm just not familiar with the appropriate sources. (But you could read Charles Fort to see what stories the newspapers *were* printing.)
And if you choose an unreliable source, you'll get a faulty prediction. Unfortunately, reliable sources are a bit uncertain about their predictions, and people tend to prefer certainty over reasonableness. I'll grant you that.
N.B.: I can also find claims that dinosaurs walk the earth, that we're going to be invaded from Mars by Martians who look like chambered Nautilus, and many other claims. (I rather miss the "Weekly World News", but the supermarket no longer carries it.)
But I'm not quite sure what your point was:
1) That unreliable sources have been making wild predictions? That's true all the way back to the Sumerians.
2) That people are choosing to believe fraudsters who make confident predictions over people who try to make correct predictions, but are a bit uncertain? That's also been true as far back as is recorded.
3) Something else? Please explain.
Radio, as a media, is designed to present topics and move onto the next without giving you time to evaluate them. Usually I want to turn it off at that point, until I've finished thinking, but if anyone else is present that's considered impolite. So I've gradually come to blatantly dislike radio. I suppose that it's OK for music, for quiz shows. (I do like to listen to "My Word".) But not to any show that tries to present anything serious.
I will agree that radio used to be much less annoying. 30-40 years ago it was often interesting, but either my thought processes slowed down around 30 years ago, or the pace of radio presentation picked up. (I tend to believe that it was that the pace of radio picked up, since it seems that around the same time there was a lot of effort going into speed reading, and processing verbal speech to "enhance clarity" by removing "dead space" (pauses, comments like "um", etc.). But the result was that I stopped listening to radio for anything but music.. And then I just stopped. I started noticing, when my wife picked up radios with speakers, that radio had become a **LOT** more annoying than it used to be, and that the key element in my annoyance was that it never gave me time to think over what was being said, and decide whether or not I believed it.
The timing *does* seem a bit questionable, but unless publishing schedules have changed markedly he must have been planning to make this speech 6 months ago....though I doubt exactly what he was going to say in it was determined until quite recently.
But the magazine article, in, I believe, the Scientific American, speculated that he was going to use this speech to render the KeystoneXL pipeline more acceptable to his supporters. That seems to have held up.
There are a lot of potential answers. Many of them are negative, but some of them are only "sort of" negative. E.g.:
1) The population is plugged into the local analog of the cloud, and doesn't want to put up with the low latency required by interstellar travel.
2) Artificial environments are so much nicer than natural planets, that nobody is interested in them.
3) TV is already one of the more effective suppressers of birth-rate. The internet is a close second. So populations just stop growing. People have more interesting things to do than taking care of kids.
4) An authoritarian government doesn't want to allow colonies to escape to breed rebels. And it's effective. (N.B.: This could be a welfare state, a plutocratic state, or any of various other varieties, and perhaps different planets have different choices.)
5) Perhaps many races can't live in low gravity, or can't stand the stresses of liftoff.
There are, of course, lots of more negative answers, like resource depletion, gray goo, etc. But we don't need to presume that the answer is always the same, or even that we know all the potential reasons yet. I've heard one argument from economics that because of intrest it's impossible for any interstellar colony to ever pay off the costs of founding it. Maybe. Or maybe that's just another hurdle that makes things more difficult. Many species may have a fear of heights or of falling that makes space flight unendurable.
Note that each of these answers only reduces the proportion of races that will engage in interstellar flight....or at least will impinge on us after doing so. And there are many other answers.
Here's another one: We may be among the first generation of planets with enough heavy metals to produce a form of civilization that can lead to space flight.
That said, do note that "super earths" are not a good place to develop spaceflight. The Earth itself is heavier than optimum, but this much gravity may be needed to hold onto viable development conditions. And how important was the moon? Some arguments have held that not only the existence of the moon, but the way that it was captured is crucial. (Note that it stabilizes the Earth's axial tilt.)
So, while I find the Fermi Paradox troubling, I don't find it insoluble.
By all means use a better propulsion system. Ion jet rockets probably are the best currently buildable. But you will still need to limit your top velocity, or you will be damaged by interstellar dust particles. Grain of sand is probably the worst to deal with. Too small to see in time to dodge, and too large to shield against. Of course, if you were going faster even smaller particles would be more dangerous. My guess is that this factor would limit you to 0.1c, but that's a wild guess. I could easily be off by a factor of 10 in either direction.
Perhaps it would help if the vehicle were preceeded by a balloon filled with ice (water). But that's rather hard to see through, and hard to manuver if you need to dodge something too large.
And the more complex you make things, the more likely it is you'll experience a breakdown along the way.
Still, one thing that we really need to do is send one of these things with an on-board telescope of moderate power. Have the ship spin slowly, and stream the pictures back to earth. You don't need a fast transmission rate as one picture/week at any given angle should suffice, and half or a quarter of that would be acceptable. But this would give us a LONG parallax line. (N.B.: I'm not talking about something with high resolution, or infrared capability, and any other exotic capability. I'm presuming that the pictures would be stitched together with software after being received. So the buffer would only need to hold one image at a time.)
Now it's true that this wouldn't show much about the target system within our lifetimes, but it might show us a great deal about things off to the side. And it would test many of our estimates of distance (which, to be frank, rest on reasonable but not directly testable assumptions). That said, even this would only directly test distances about near bodies. It's not a long enough baseline to directly test Cephid variable distances, except a few. And I'm only expecting it to verify what is already known. But it would allow us to test our model of the local 3d starspace against direct imagery.
Verbosity *IS* a problem, though not as bad as sometimes painted. Automatic documentation generation can get around a lot of it, but the documentation itself need to either be compace, or at least have a compact mode, where you can see all the methods in a class on one screen...preferably with brief notes about what they do.
Ada partially solves this with their header files (which are much more readable and useful than C's). But it doesn't handle the documentation problem at all well. (I don't like Doxygen, because it spreads simple things over multiple pages, which defeats half the purpose.) Javadoc works well with some IDEs, because they let you readily access the documentation while you're programming something else. Perhaps there's something similar for Ada that I don't know about.
Verbose code does NOT have a better chance of working better on the first attempt...except sometimes. Being a bit dyslexic I find that my usual problem is getting a logical comparison backwards. Fortunately, verbose unit testing can resolve this. Unfortunately, half the time it turns out that the backwards logic test was in my debugging code. Still, if the errors are caught during testing it's much better than only catching them much later. So my debug tests tend to be quite verbose. Which means I want a language that supports that. (For that, among many other reasons, I currently prefer Digital Mars D [dmd].) But there are other languages that come close, sometimes for other reasons, like having a better supported set of libraries. Python is another language I like, for other reasons. And if Vala would ever get production ready I'd be quite interested in it. (Note that all these languages have decent support for unicode, also. Which is the main reason *I* prefer Python3 over Python2. [Python2 can handle unicode, but it's a bit clumsy, and you had really better not mix the dialects.])
I don't know about Javascript and PHP, but Ruby doesn't require that the code not be clean. Neither does Objective C. And C++ is generally not too bad, until you start using STL. (C++ templates would give me nightmares, except that I switched to more civilized languages. Like Python and D (dmd).
That said, I'd really like to use Smalltalk, but it's too slow, and doesn't work well on a multi-processor system. (Yeah, that's implementation rather than basic language. And much the same criticisms can be leveled at Python and Ruby, but they don't try to insist that you do everything in one language.)
What would be really interesting is a multi-processor version of Vala that was decently documented, but it looks as if it's never going to get as far as a beta release. (Well, it's been 3 months since I last looked, but I've been looking periodically for years.)
It may be a joke, and I know of no reason to believe it, but unless you can prove it didn't/doesn't happen that way you shouldn't close your mind to the possibility.