If they'd done as you're supposed to and submitted a paper for peer review FIRST, it would have been quietly shredded by the reviewers
In (partial) defense of the NASA folks, they had indeed submitted the paper for peer review, and it had been accepted to Science magazine - it appeared online the same day (or close to it) as their hand-waving press conference. That it didn't get shredded by peer reviewers is testament to either the laziness of peer reviewers, or the ease with which high-profile journals can be duped into publishing weak but exciting claims. (This happens frequently, I'm afraid.) They should have done much more thorough experiments, but the journals are supposed to filter out hypotheses that haven't been sufficiently proven.
The problem with the press conference was that they made much more grandiose claims about the importance of their work than the evidence merited. If they'd stuck to publishing the paper and a diplomatically-worded press release, it still would have been very controversial, but it would not have elicited such a passionate response.
Project Orion (the 1970's attempt at a thermonuclear rocket) would have take 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri (assuming a fly-by with no deceleration time, and excluding 36 days worth of acceleration to it's top speed).
That was Freeman Dyson's calculation of what sort of extreme the technology could be pushed to; it's by no means a sure thing. However, the Orion drive was vastly more complicated (and expensive) than the nuclear thermal rockets they're talking about in the article, which would never be able to get to anywhere close to 1% of light speed. The big difference is that an NTR engine was actually built and worked at one point, whereas Orion was never more than blueprints. Also, an NTR is something that a private company could theoretically build, whereas Orion requires setting off repeated fission explosions, which only a handful of governments know how to do - and which in any case genuinely would cause an uproar.
I do predict, however, that eventually the terms of the debate will change, and the deniers will start changing their argument
You got the tense wrong - I've been noticing a steady shift in online arguments over the last few years. The sequence goes approximately like this:
"The earth isn't warming, if anything it's getting colder."
"Maybe the earth is warming, but this is due to (natural climate flucations|sunspots|God)."
"Sure, CO2 emissions could be raising the global temperature, but we can't stop this without (totalitarian social engineering measures|China|reverting to a pre-industrial level of civilization)."
"Sure, CO2 emissions are raising the global temperature, but is this really such a bad thing?"
"Let's emit even more CO2 so we can make plants happy and grow bananas in Manitoba!"
At this rate, in a few years I expect to see the "skeptics" claiming that we have a profound moral duty to avoid public transportation, run our SUV engines and AC in the parking lot, and convert all of our solar and wind facilities into coal-fired plants. (Think of all the Eskimo children who will be saved from hypothermia!)
In any event, the throughput for NVIDIA's Tesla product lines are quite impressive. They really are revolutionizing computational biology, where there are many NP complete and NP Hard problems that can only be tackled with very past processors (in parallel) and with heuristic rather than exact algorithms. Do you know if these are manufactured here or in Asia?
I don't know where they're manufactured; my impression was that most of the really powerful chip-fabrication technology was still essentially based in the US. This is one area in which China is still substantially behind, although they're certainly not stagnant.
I agree that GPUs are making a significant contribution to the biomedical sciences, but once again, most of the progress has been in the US and Europe. Moreover, there are still limits to what they're useful for; in my specialty, X-ray crystallography, they don't gain us much. In any case, any organization with enough money can buy a rackful of GPUs, write a few dozen lines of CUDA, and brag about its newfound processing might and cutting-edge software. I'm not impressed until I see major innovations that truly surpass the work being done in the First World. I'm sure China is working on this, but I haven't seen anything yet that makes me fear for my job (especially not in my field). The most frightening aspect is China's willingness to throw large amounts of money at boosting their scientific output - because many interesting problems are limited as much by expense as by experimental details.
the Chinese are picking up on the technology and on genomic data mining far faster and with more intensity than is the broader US tech community.
You're forgetting that the vast majority of countries actually developing this technology, and making it available to consumers, are based in the US (and Britain, to some degree). One recent article about the BGI that I read last year noted the irony of seeing several crates of sequencing machines stamped "MADE IN THE USA" waiting to be unloaded in Shenzhen. The Chinese government is certainly willing to spend large amounts of money advancing their capabilities, but I haven't seen any evidence that they're significant surpassing the US in anything other than sequencing capacity. (And the machines they're using are very good for generating large quantities of data, but the quality of said data is somewhat suspect.)
Given the size of their brainpower base and the rate at which they are adapting the technology the Chinese are well on their way to dominating the drug development and physiological/functional genomic sciences in the next 10 years.
Except that genomics has as of yet proven minimally useful for drug development. Until they actually develop significant amounts of homegrown technology (which, to be fair, they are actually doing in the bioinformatics arena, as opposed to sequencing), I'm not convinced that they're that much of a threat. What they will certainly accomplish, I think, is a record of high-profile scientific output and the ability to compete on even terms with the rest of the industrial superpowers. No mean feat considering where they were 40 years ago, and certainly some cause for concern given their large and inexpensive labor force, but it's not the same thing as suddenly eclipsing the USA in technology that they're still mostly importing or stealing.
you need to get about 300x coverage just for a bacterial genome
OUCH. Wasn't the original high-quality human genome sequence (using Sanger technology) only about 10x? And doesn't having only 20bp per read basically rule out de novo sequencing of any eukaryote? Even for bacteria that sounds tricky without a closely-related reference sequence.
I always wondered why FPGA's aren't used for this kind of stuff, or if they already are. I would imagine they would even be faster because you can design a circuit specifically optimized for the problem.
I think they are to some degree, but there is a major barrier to adopting them: they require specialized programming knowledge which you won't find in most genomics centers. GPUs are commodity technology and APIs like CUDA are easier to tackle (and more transferable to other fields) than FPGA programming. (Or such was my impression - I know a lot about bioinformatics, but much less about FPGAs.)
There is at least one company that sells hardware specially accelerated for bioinformatics, CLC bio. I don't know if they use FPGAs or some kind of ASIC.
Feels odd to be living through the prequel to a Vernor Vinge novel....
Except that the names in that book weren't distinctively Chinese; if anything they look more Vietnamese: Vinh, Nuwen (i.e. Nguyen), etc., plus one character named Park, which I believe would be Korean. More importantly, the Qeng Ho was essentially a quasi-libertarian interstellar trading consortium, not an authoritarian government. If anything, a closer analogue to the modern PRC is the Emergents (whose ethnic background is never specified, but probably mixed).
Politically, China has the advantage that it's not involved in a dick-waving contest with some Soviet boogeyman
Right, they're in a dick-waving contest with the US, and pretty much the rest of the world for that matter.
and instead of racing toward a symbolic goal that serves no tangible purpose, they're slowly and steadily building up a knowledge base to make the space program a sustainable benefit for their society.
I don't think launching a Chinese space station or landing a Chinese citizen on the moon is going to benefit their society, other than the immense propaganda rewards for the CCP, which is the entire point of the exercise. China has no shortage of mineral resources already; there is nothing on the moon that would benefit them economically.
The ability of theists to extract reasons for whatever nastiness they may want to commit has shown no limits so far.
This ability is not limited to the religious; it is a universal human affliction. An overwhelming majority of mass murders in the 20th century were justified by long-standing ethnic grievances, pseudo-scientific claims of racial superiority, pseudo-scientific claims of historical inevitability, pure revanchist nationalism, and sheer paranoia. Arguably the most egregious example was the attempted elimination of an ancient religious group by followers of a very modern ideology that never took on overtly religious trappings. (Granted, the Christian churches in Germany could have done more to stop the Nazis, but they were hardly the instigators, and at worst allowed themselves to be co-opted.) Probably the largest single pool of victims were killed by governments that actively suppressed religion (and in many cases continue to do so today), but which themselves espoused a messianic ideology. Historically speaking, the heyday of religiously-motivated massacres was the millennium between approximately 650 AD and 1650 AD, and one need look no further than the campaigns of the Mongols (~500,000 killed in the sack of Baghdad) or Timur (pyramids of skulls) to see that religion was frequently unimportant.
The sad fact is that some people simply enjoy brutalizing their fellow humans, and will latch onto any justification they can find for cold-blooded murder of innocents. The perpetrators of the killings of last century all believed that history was on their side, and that violence was essential to usher in the perfect society. There is no shortage of delusional belief systems that the violent elements can abuse to gain popular support for their actions. It would be folly to believe that only religion is to blame for this, or that atheism is any indicator of a reduced propensity for murder and mayhem.
And before you ask, I'm an atheist, and militant secularist.
It seems all prizes and research goes to Cancer and AIDS since they get the most newstime and general attention? But these two diseases seem to be extremely difficult to cure fully all the same when you consider the billions of dollars invested the last few decades.
Actually, while AIDS hasn't been truly cured, it is now a manageable illness in the First World due to a number of extremely successful therapies. The major effort now is devoted to preventing it entirely through use of vaccines.
Cancer is much more complicated because it isn't one disease - the various cell types all behave extremely differently, ranging from prostate cancer which is treatable (and may not even be noticed in some cases) to liver cancer which is deadly. And it's not just which part of the body, either; the types of mutations that they end up with may be equally varied in some cases. Some therapies offer significantly better chances of survival for specific cancers: Gleevec for CML is one of the most successful, and there is finally a drug that can at least slow down melanoma. But it's a long, hard slog, and no one expects that a single therapy will ever cure even a majority of cases.
I think these researchers should look at outsourcing these efforts, and China now has bragging rights to the fastest computer.
Except they don't - the Japanese just brought a system online that is around 3x more powerful.
But a more general issue is that you don't need a conventional supercomputer to analyze genomic data - you just need a lot of aggregate processing power. Supercomputers are good for serial numerical methods like molecular dynamics, climate modeling, or simulating nuclear explosions (the only reason anyone cares that China is "beating" the US). Genome analysis can easily be done with distributed power, and there is plenty of that in the US, although probably not enough to be dedicated 24/7 to genome analysis. Besides, the problem of "too much" data is as much an issue of researcher time as it is of technology. Computers can take care of the brute force stuff like sequence assembly, but genomics isn't simply about generating files full of ACGT - ultimately the goal is to come up with new hypotheses about disease, evolution, etc., and that takes actual brains.
Having 5 single trip missions to planetary bodies will be more expensive, in the long term, than building a spaceship like the one I describe, because those 5 missions will be custom-built for the task at hand.
Read the article I linked. It's designed to take advantage of economies of scale by combining all of the R&D that would need to be done to even support such missions. Combining them into one big spaceship wouldn't make it much cheaper - and it still won't have artificial gravity, and it definitely won't be able to travel outside the solar system.
Reaching, let's say, 50% of light speed is not out of question. It's a matter of slowly accelerating to the appropriate speed.
You can't accelerate infinitely - the maximum speed will be limited by exhaust velocity (I think there is a factor of 2 involved somewhere, i.e. 2*exhaust velocity = max speed). With the type of technology that we could actually build now, this limits us to maybe 5% c at best, which still makes some generous assumptions. Daedalus required technology that we haven't mastered, and that would only go 10% c. Going any faster basically requires antimatter propulsion, and we don't know how to generate or contain that much antimatter, aside from all of the other issues involved with near-light-speed travel, like shielding.
Doing five super expensive missions to the outer planets is extremely stupid when, with the same money, you can build a big spaceship that has artificial gravity, hydroponics, science labs and a huge nuclear reactor to power it for eons.
Great, and that's going to cost how much, exactly? I'll bet it's a hell of a lot more than those five missions McNutt describes - each of which, mind you, would carry a crew of just 6. (And I'm pretty sure he specifies that these would need to be nuclear powered to be remotely feasible.)
You can then travel to any planet, or even the nearest stars, assuming you can get to relativistic speeds.
That's assuming an awful lot, considering that the best we could possibly do with modern technology is at most, maybe, 5% of light speed, and even that would require engineering on a scale we've never contemplated. The Project Daedalus spaceship was supposed to travel at approximately 10% of lightspeed, but that required technology (He3 fusion) that we know is theoretically possible but haven't yet been able to build. (It's going to cost around 20 billion Euros to build the first deuterium/tritium fusion reactor that actually generates surplus power, and it's stationary in southern France, not a spacecraft.) It also required sucking He3 from the atmosphere of a gas giant for 20 years - and of course the entire thing was unmanned, and wasn't designed to stop once it reached its destination. Estimated cost in the 1970s was $100 trillion; I doubt it's gotten any cheaper since then, but we're a lot more indebted.
governments of the world can spend significantly more than 5% of GDP on military (vast majority of which is... a completely waste), and you're saying they can't (if they were actually interested in the idea) spend that much on doing something about "getting off this rock"?
The US actually spends less than 5% of GDP on its military, and we can't even afford that at this point. And even if we devoted our entire military budget to colonizing space, we would still not be capable of creating self-sufficient colonies. But whether it's possible or not is irrelevant. Our current budget priorities, however flawed they may be, are still more-or-less determined by popular will. And the voters want things that they feel benefit them: protection against spending their retirement in poverty and/or illness, protection against scary foreigners, etc.
So, if a large portion of the $700 billion or so we flush down the toilet of "defense spending" were to suddenly become available, what do you think the voters would want done with the money? Options under consideration might be a) refund it to the taxpayers, b) fix our fucked-up healthcare system, c) pay off the national debt now and not buy anything more until we're debt-free, or - your preferred option - d) spend it on putting a relative handful of military and scientists on Mars in the hope that someday, if the Earth were to be obliterated, a tiny fraction of humanity might survive in their sealed bubble. Keep in mind that none of the people who would actually pay for (d) will still be alive by the time we can make such a colony truly immune to a catastrophe on Earth, and very few of their descendants will get to emigrate either. It doesn't matter whether it's technically feasible and affordable - it is politically impossible. (And no, the Chinese won't do it either, because they're not insane.)
It's a matter of having say 5% of the world population dedicated to getting off this planet... and not be real-estate brokers, or financial analysts, etc. There are plenty of industries that can and should decrease in size---and there are industries that can and should grow---governments can just make it easier for aerospace industry to grow a bit faster than say "creative financial instruments" industry.
Even if governments were to eliminate taxes for companies dedicated to manned space exploration and exploitation, it wouldn't even employ a fraction of 5% of the world's population. You're talking about something that would require (at least) tens of billions in startup capital per company - realistically, you'd need a massive government subsidy. Don't lecture me about asteroid mining; even if it could be made profitable in the long term (and I'm not convinced of that), we are decades away from the technology we need to do it. No (sane) company is going to sink tens of billions into something that will take decades to pay off. That's why we have government investment in basic sciences anyway. So, ultimately, it comes down to spending tax dollars on a massive extraterrestrial colonization effort.
And I already know about Elon Musk and Space-X - and I wish him the best of luck. It would be fantastic if someone could come up with a sustainable business model for orbital spaceflight (other than getting your local Congresspeople to legislate your product into the NASA budget). But even if they succeed on all counts, manned space flight is still going to be too expensive for anyone except the government and the mega-rich, and colonization is still out of the question. Elon says he wants to retire on Mars, which is a nice fantasy if you don't mind spending your old age being sealed in a bubble and recycling your waste products, but he's going to need to make a shitload of money off satellite launches if he wants to afford it. Right now, I don't think even Bill Gates could afford this. I can maybe see them making a manned flyby in a couple of decades, but even that is going to take a huge chunk out of their revenues and yield no short-term return.
So the cost to get someone into LEO in their birthday suit, let alone anywhere interesting like an established moon base, currently exceeds the average total asset holdings of most first world citizens.
And it just keeps getting worse from there. Scientists who actually understand this stuff - all of them supporters of manned space exploration! - have come up with some interesting numbers for the expense of long-range expeditions. Ralph McNutt at JHU wrote a good article about exploring the outer planets using currently feasible technology. He envisions a series of five missions, each designed to avoid lethal radiation exposure, in the latter half of the 21st century. Estimated cost: $4 trillion. There's no colonization involved - this is just for doing flybys of gas giants and their moons. Sustaining a permanent settlement somewhere won't be any easier, because we'd need constant supply runs from Earth. How long does anyone think a moon base would last without a supply line? Think it'll be any easier on Mars?
Now, I actually think we should do all this stuff at some point in the future - but it needs to get at least an order of magnitude cheaper before I'll advocate spending other people's money on it. Maybe with another hundred years' scientific development in the fields of human physiology, nanotechnology, and propulsion systems we'll be able to afford interplanetary travel for relatively large numbers of people. Right now, however, if we try to establish a permanent base (which we can't afford) on Mars, with enough fertile individuals to perpetuate the human race, they're basically equally fucked if the Earth gets hit by an asteroid - they'll just take a little longer to die.
At least if we spread out to Mars, those humans on Mars would remember those lost on Earth
Yeah, and they'd have a few extra months to reflect on the demise of humanity, as they waited for their systems to break down and kill them. Sorry, but independently sustainable settlement on other planets is impossible for the foreseeable future.
...as long as someone other than AT&T implements it, so those of us who live in the Bay Area or New York City can actually use it.
On a more serious note, if wireless clothing becomes a tool for remotely monitoring medical status, doesn't this open carriers up to potential lawsuits when their network fails and someone dies of treatable maladies as a result?
If you have these ideas of profiting from providing people with better technology - learn Mandarin.
Okay, now I'm double-posting, but I just couldn't resist: do you really think that China is more of a free market than the United States? Do you really think their government just stays out of the way and never micromanages anything? China may be notorious for letting employers treat workers like cattle and generate massive amounts of industrial pollution, but that's not the same as having a laissez-faire economy.
I usually ignore your free-market trolling, but in this case I have some actual knowledge about how biomedical research works. Also, one of the authors already has the full paper available for download on his website. Guess who paid for it?
"Grant sponsor: National Institutes of Health; Grant number: NIH R01 EB007942; Grant sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF); Grant number: 0643836; Grant sponsor: Siemens Healthcare (The Siemens-MIT Alliance)."
Still think it's great technology? (Yeah, I know - the free market would have thought of it first if the big bad government wasn't taking its money.)
There aren't many that do so because most scientists aren't charlatans. Most scientists are actually interested in the truth.
It's actually kind of depressing how these arguments unfold. One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is the chorus of claims that mainstream academics (and funding agencies) are biased against whatever theory is being pushed. The fact that nearly the entire scientific community rejects these theories is taken to be self-evident proof of groupthink, a conspiracy of silence*, or pure profiteering. In some fields, many of the loudest complaints come from people who've never actually done much research themselves, probably because actual science is far too demoralizing for someone who relies on faith to guide their beliefs. Very few creationists have ever worked in a biology lab, for instance - but they weasel out of this by claiming that of course the entire community is biased against them anyway, so what's the point?
(* The creationists are big fans of this; it is very common to see creationist blogs etc. hinting about tenured biology professors who know the truth, but are afraid to publish their evidence - or reveal their names, naturally - for fear that Richard Dawkins will have them rubbed out, or something equally dire. And I'm certain that in 50 years, we'll be hearing the same goddamn thing.)
MANY academics got their research grants via a government system that has preferentially given them out to studies that deal with the subject of "global warming". Regardless of the reason(s) behind that, it still amounts to a skewed expenditure of dollars... and NOT on the side of Big Oil.
You obviously didn't read the rest of my comment, so I'll restate: there is vastly more money available for promoting the continued consumption of fossil fuels. Furthermore, that money, being private revenue, is not subject to federal rules about grant money, so more of it is available to be spent taking congressmen on "fact-finding trips" to golf courses.
More to the point, if the fossil fuel industry thought there was some ironclad science that would disprove current theories about AGW, they have plenty of money to spend on it. The fact that they don't indicates to me that they're not that stupid, and they're spending the money elsewhere, like lobbying, and finding new gas and oil reserves (which employs many PhD holders). The Koch brothers actually did contribute $100,000 to Richard Mueller's meta-study, thinking that he'd discredit the academic consensus about temperature increase over the last 50 years. Oops.
You include that "region depopulating" bit, as if it were a "bad thing".
That's easy to say when it's not your family dying of drought-induced starvation. But what are a few dead Somalis worth compared to the comfort of running your air conditioning in the parking lot?
I am by no means convinced that there is a causation link between the two, or that most (obviously not all) of the people preaching AGW aren't doing it because they benefit from "green" research and development, which is more often than not (and unfortunately) a rip-off.
I think it bears reminding everyone, again, that the 6 of the top 10 companies in the world by revenue are oil and gas producers, and the total revenue of the fossil fuel-based energy companies is in the multiple trillions of dollars, a scale comparable to the US federal budget. This is at least two orders of magnitude more money than the DOE's annual budget (more than a third of which is spent on nuclear security, not "green" research), and more than three orders of magnitude more than the federal government wasted on Solyndra. So even if most of the people claiming that AGW is real are doing it for the money (which is bullshit - academic scientists don't make very much, at least not compared to oil and gas company scientists), it's not exactly a level playing field.
Slashdot Mirror
If they'd done as you're supposed to and submitted a paper for peer review FIRST, it would have been quietly shredded by the reviewers
In (partial) defense of the NASA folks, they had indeed submitted the paper for peer review, and it had been accepted to Science magazine - it appeared online the same day (or close to it) as their hand-waving press conference. That it didn't get shredded by peer reviewers is testament to either the laziness of peer reviewers, or the ease with which high-profile journals can be duped into publishing weak but exciting claims. (This happens frequently, I'm afraid.) They should have done much more thorough experiments, but the journals are supposed to filter out hypotheses that haven't been sufficiently proven.
The problem with the press conference was that they made much more grandiose claims about the importance of their work than the evidence merited. If they'd stuck to publishing the paper and a diplomatically-worded press release, it still would have been very controversial, but it would not have elicited such a passionate response.
Project Orion (the 1970's attempt at a thermonuclear rocket) would have take 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri (assuming a fly-by with no deceleration time, and excluding 36 days worth of acceleration to it's top speed).
That was Freeman Dyson's calculation of what sort of extreme the technology could be pushed to; it's by no means a sure thing. However, the Orion drive was vastly more complicated (and expensive) than the nuclear thermal rockets they're talking about in the article, which would never be able to get to anywhere close to 1% of light speed. The big difference is that an NTR engine was actually built and worked at one point, whereas Orion was never more than blueprints. Also, an NTR is something that a private company could theoretically build, whereas Orion requires setting off repeated fission explosions, which only a handful of governments know how to do - and which in any case genuinely would cause an uproar.
I do predict, however, that eventually the terms of the debate will change, and the deniers will start changing their argument
You got the tense wrong - I've been noticing a steady shift in online arguments over the last few years. The sequence goes approximately like this:
At this rate, in a few years I expect to see the "skeptics" claiming that we have a profound moral duty to avoid public transportation, run our SUV engines and AC in the parking lot, and convert all of our solar and wind facilities into coal-fired plants. (Think of all the Eskimo children who will be saved from hypothermia!)
In any event, the throughput for NVIDIA's Tesla product lines are quite impressive. They really are revolutionizing computational biology, where there are many NP complete and NP Hard problems that can only be tackled with very past processors (in parallel) and with heuristic rather than exact algorithms. Do you know if these are manufactured here or in Asia?
I don't know where they're manufactured; my impression was that most of the really powerful chip-fabrication technology was still essentially based in the US. This is one area in which China is still substantially behind, although they're certainly not stagnant.
I agree that GPUs are making a significant contribution to the biomedical sciences, but once again, most of the progress has been in the US and Europe. Moreover, there are still limits to what they're useful for; in my specialty, X-ray crystallography, they don't gain us much. In any case, any organization with enough money can buy a rackful of GPUs, write a few dozen lines of CUDA, and brag about its newfound processing might and cutting-edge software. I'm not impressed until I see major innovations that truly surpass the work being done in the First World. I'm sure China is working on this, but I haven't seen anything yet that makes me fear for my job (especially not in my field). The most frightening aspect is China's willingness to throw large amounts of money at boosting their scientific output - because many interesting problems are limited as much by expense as by experimental details.
the Chinese are picking up on the technology and on genomic data mining far faster and with more intensity than is the broader US tech community.
You're forgetting that the vast majority of countries actually developing this technology, and making it available to consumers, are based in the US (and Britain, to some degree). One recent article about the BGI that I read last year noted the irony of seeing several crates of sequencing machines stamped "MADE IN THE USA" waiting to be unloaded in Shenzhen. The Chinese government is certainly willing to spend large amounts of money advancing their capabilities, but I haven't seen any evidence that they're significant surpassing the US in anything other than sequencing capacity. (And the machines they're using are very good for generating large quantities of data, but the quality of said data is somewhat suspect.)
Given the size of their brainpower base and the rate at which they are adapting the technology the Chinese are well on their way to dominating the drug development and physiological/functional genomic sciences in the next 10 years.
Except that genomics has as of yet proven minimally useful for drug development. Until they actually develop significant amounts of homegrown technology (which, to be fair, they are actually doing in the bioinformatics arena, as opposed to sequencing), I'm not convinced that they're that much of a threat. What they will certainly accomplish, I think, is a record of high-profile scientific output and the ability to compete on even terms with the rest of the industrial superpowers. No mean feat considering where they were 40 years ago, and certainly some cause for concern given their large and inexpensive labor force, but it's not the same thing as suddenly eclipsing the USA in technology that they're still mostly importing or stealing.
you need to get about 300x coverage just for a bacterial genome
OUCH. Wasn't the original high-quality human genome sequence (using Sanger technology) only about 10x? And doesn't having only 20bp per read basically rule out de novo sequencing of any eukaryote? Even for bacteria that sounds tricky without a closely-related reference sequence.
I always wondered why FPGA's aren't used for this kind of stuff, or if they already are. I would imagine they would even be faster because you can design a circuit specifically optimized for the problem.
I think they are to some degree, but there is a major barrier to adopting them: they require specialized programming knowledge which you won't find in most genomics centers. GPUs are commodity technology and APIs like CUDA are easier to tackle (and more transferable to other fields) than FPGA programming. (Or such was my impression - I know a lot about bioinformatics, but much less about FPGAs.)
There is at least one company that sells hardware specially accelerated for bioinformatics, CLC bio. I don't know if they use FPGAs or some kind of ASIC.
Feels odd to be living through the prequel to a Vernor Vinge novel....
Except that the names in that book weren't distinctively Chinese; if anything they look more Vietnamese: Vinh, Nuwen (i.e. Nguyen), etc., plus one character named Park, which I believe would be Korean. More importantly, the Qeng Ho was essentially a quasi-libertarian interstellar trading consortium, not an authoritarian government. If anything, a closer analogue to the modern PRC is the Emergents (whose ethnic background is never specified, but probably mixed).
Politically, China has the advantage that it's not involved in a dick-waving contest with some Soviet boogeyman
Right, they're in a dick-waving contest with the US, and pretty much the rest of the world for that matter.
and instead of racing toward a symbolic goal that serves no tangible purpose, they're slowly and steadily building up a knowledge base to make the space program a sustainable benefit for their society.
I don't think launching a Chinese space station or landing a Chinese citizen on the moon is going to benefit their society, other than the immense propaganda rewards for the CCP, which is the entire point of the exercise. China has no shortage of mineral resources already; there is nothing on the moon that would benefit them economically.
The ability of theists to extract reasons for whatever nastiness they may want to commit has shown no limits so far.
This ability is not limited to the religious; it is a universal human affliction. An overwhelming majority of mass murders in the 20th century were justified by long-standing ethnic grievances, pseudo-scientific claims of racial superiority, pseudo-scientific claims of historical inevitability, pure revanchist nationalism, and sheer paranoia. Arguably the most egregious example was the attempted elimination of an ancient religious group by followers of a very modern ideology that never took on overtly religious trappings. (Granted, the Christian churches in Germany could have done more to stop the Nazis, but they were hardly the instigators, and at worst allowed themselves to be co-opted.) Probably the largest single pool of victims were killed by governments that actively suppressed religion (and in many cases continue to do so today), but which themselves espoused a messianic ideology. Historically speaking, the heyday of religiously-motivated massacres was the millennium between approximately 650 AD and 1650 AD, and one need look no further than the campaigns of the Mongols (~500,000 killed in the sack of Baghdad) or Timur (pyramids of skulls) to see that religion was frequently unimportant.
The sad fact is that some people simply enjoy brutalizing their fellow humans, and will latch onto any justification they can find for cold-blooded murder of innocents. The perpetrators of the killings of last century all believed that history was on their side, and that violence was essential to usher in the perfect society. There is no shortage of delusional belief systems that the violent elements can abuse to gain popular support for their actions. It would be folly to believe that only religion is to blame for this, or that atheism is any indicator of a reduced propensity for murder and mayhem.
And before you ask, I'm an atheist, and militant secularist.
It seems all prizes and research goes to Cancer and AIDS since they get the most newstime and general attention? But these two diseases seem to be extremely difficult to cure fully all the same when you consider the billions of dollars invested the last few decades.
Actually, while AIDS hasn't been truly cured, it is now a manageable illness in the First World due to a number of extremely successful therapies. The major effort now is devoted to preventing it entirely through use of vaccines.
Cancer is much more complicated because it isn't one disease - the various cell types all behave extremely differently, ranging from prostate cancer which is treatable (and may not even be noticed in some cases) to liver cancer which is deadly. And it's not just which part of the body, either; the types of mutations that they end up with may be equally varied in some cases. Some therapies offer significantly better chances of survival for specific cancers: Gleevec for CML is one of the most successful, and there is finally a drug that can at least slow down melanoma. But it's a long, hard slog, and no one expects that a single therapy will ever cure even a majority of cases.
I think these researchers should look at outsourcing these efforts, and China now has bragging rights to the fastest computer.
Except they don't - the Japanese just brought a system online that is around 3x more powerful.
But a more general issue is that you don't need a conventional supercomputer to analyze genomic data - you just need a lot of aggregate processing power. Supercomputers are good for serial numerical methods like molecular dynamics, climate modeling, or simulating nuclear explosions (the only reason anyone cares that China is "beating" the US). Genome analysis can easily be done with distributed power, and there is plenty of that in the US, although probably not enough to be dedicated 24/7 to genome analysis. Besides, the problem of "too much" data is as much an issue of researcher time as it is of technology. Computers can take care of the brute force stuff like sequence assembly, but genomics isn't simply about generating files full of ACGT - ultimately the goal is to come up with new hypotheses about disease, evolution, etc., and that takes actual brains.
Having 5 single trip missions to planetary bodies will be more expensive, in the long term, than building a spaceship like the one I describe, because those 5 missions will be custom-built for the task at hand.
Read the article I linked. It's designed to take advantage of economies of scale by combining all of the R&D that would need to be done to even support such missions. Combining them into one big spaceship wouldn't make it much cheaper - and it still won't have artificial gravity, and it definitely won't be able to travel outside the solar system.
Reaching, let's say, 50% of light speed is not out of question. It's a matter of slowly accelerating to the appropriate speed.
You can't accelerate infinitely - the maximum speed will be limited by exhaust velocity (I think there is a factor of 2 involved somewhere, i.e. 2*exhaust velocity = max speed). With the type of technology that we could actually build now, this limits us to maybe 5% c at best, which still makes some generous assumptions. Daedalus required technology that we haven't mastered, and that would only go 10% c. Going any faster basically requires antimatter propulsion, and we don't know how to generate or contain that much antimatter, aside from all of the other issues involved with near-light-speed travel, like shielding.
Doing five super expensive missions to the outer planets is extremely stupid when, with the same money, you can build a big spaceship that has artificial gravity, hydroponics, science labs and a huge nuclear reactor to power it for eons.
Great, and that's going to cost how much, exactly? I'll bet it's a hell of a lot more than those five missions McNutt describes - each of which, mind you, would carry a crew of just 6. (And I'm pretty sure he specifies that these would need to be nuclear powered to be remotely feasible.)
You can then travel to any planet, or even the nearest stars, assuming you can get to relativistic speeds.
That's assuming an awful lot, considering that the best we could possibly do with modern technology is at most, maybe, 5% of light speed, and even that would require engineering on a scale we've never contemplated. The Project Daedalus spaceship was supposed to travel at approximately 10% of lightspeed, but that required technology (He3 fusion) that we know is theoretically possible but haven't yet been able to build. (It's going to cost around 20 billion Euros to build the first deuterium/tritium fusion reactor that actually generates surplus power, and it's stationary in southern France, not a spacecraft.) It also required sucking He3 from the atmosphere of a gas giant for 20 years - and of course the entire thing was unmanned, and wasn't designed to stop once it reached its destination. Estimated cost in the 1970s was $100 trillion; I doubt it's gotten any cheaper since then, but we're a lot more indebted.
governments of the world can spend significantly more than 5% of GDP on military (vast majority of which is... a completely waste), and you're saying they can't (if they were actually interested in the idea) spend that much on doing something about "getting off this rock"?
The US actually spends less than 5% of GDP on its military, and we can't even afford that at this point. And even if we devoted our entire military budget to colonizing space, we would still not be capable of creating self-sufficient colonies. But whether it's possible or not is irrelevant. Our current budget priorities, however flawed they may be, are still more-or-less determined by popular will. And the voters want things that they feel benefit them: protection against spending their retirement in poverty and/or illness, protection against scary foreigners, etc.
So, if a large portion of the $700 billion or so we flush down the toilet of "defense spending" were to suddenly become available, what do you think the voters would want done with the money? Options under consideration might be a) refund it to the taxpayers, b) fix our fucked-up healthcare system, c) pay off the national debt now and not buy anything more until we're debt-free, or - your preferred option - d) spend it on putting a relative handful of military and scientists on Mars in the hope that someday, if the Earth were to be obliterated, a tiny fraction of humanity might survive in their sealed bubble. Keep in mind that none of the people who would actually pay for (d) will still be alive by the time we can make such a colony truly immune to a catastrophe on Earth, and very few of their descendants will get to emigrate either. It doesn't matter whether it's technically feasible and affordable - it is politically impossible. (And no, the Chinese won't do it either, because they're not insane.)
It's a matter of having say 5% of the world population dedicated to getting off this planet... and not be real-estate brokers, or financial analysts, etc. There are plenty of industries that can and should decrease in size---and there are industries that can and should grow---governments can just make it easier for aerospace industry to grow a bit faster than say "creative financial instruments" industry.
Even if governments were to eliminate taxes for companies dedicated to manned space exploration and exploitation, it wouldn't even employ a fraction of 5% of the world's population. You're talking about something that would require (at least) tens of billions in startup capital per company - realistically, you'd need a massive government subsidy. Don't lecture me about asteroid mining; even if it could be made profitable in the long term (and I'm not convinced of that), we are decades away from the technology we need to do it. No (sane) company is going to sink tens of billions into something that will take decades to pay off. That's why we have government investment in basic sciences anyway. So, ultimately, it comes down to spending tax dollars on a massive extraterrestrial colonization effort.
And I already know about Elon Musk and Space-X - and I wish him the best of luck. It would be fantastic if someone could come up with a sustainable business model for orbital spaceflight (other than getting your local Congresspeople to legislate your product into the NASA budget). But even if they succeed on all counts, manned space flight is still going to be too expensive for anyone except the government and the mega-rich, and colonization is still out of the question. Elon says he wants to retire on Mars, which is a nice fantasy if you don't mind spending your old age being sealed in a bubble and recycling your waste products, but he's going to need to make a shitload of money off satellite launches if he wants to afford it. Right now, I don't think even Bill Gates could afford this. I can maybe see them making a manned flyby in a couple of decades, but even that is going to take a huge chunk out of their revenues and yield no short-term return.
So the cost to get someone into LEO in their birthday suit, let alone anywhere interesting like an established moon base, currently exceeds the average total asset holdings of most first world citizens.
And it just keeps getting worse from there. Scientists who actually understand this stuff - all of them supporters of manned space exploration! - have come up with some interesting numbers for the expense of long-range expeditions. Ralph McNutt at JHU wrote a good article about exploring the outer planets using currently feasible technology. He envisions a series of five missions, each designed to avoid lethal radiation exposure, in the latter half of the 21st century. Estimated cost: $4 trillion. There's no colonization involved - this is just for doing flybys of gas giants and their moons. Sustaining a permanent settlement somewhere won't be any easier, because we'd need constant supply runs from Earth. How long does anyone think a moon base would last without a supply line? Think it'll be any easier on Mars?
Now, I actually think we should do all this stuff at some point in the future - but it needs to get at least an order of magnitude cheaper before I'll advocate spending other people's money on it. Maybe with another hundred years' scientific development in the fields of human physiology, nanotechnology, and propulsion systems we'll be able to afford interplanetary travel for relatively large numbers of people. Right now, however, if we try to establish a permanent base (which we can't afford) on Mars, with enough fertile individuals to perpetuate the human race, they're basically equally fucked if the Earth gets hit by an asteroid - they'll just take a little longer to die.
At least if we spread out to Mars, those humans on Mars would remember those lost on Earth
Yeah, and they'd have a few extra months to reflect on the demise of humanity, as they waited for their systems to break down and kill them. Sorry, but independently sustainable settlement on other planets is impossible for the foreseeable future.
...as long as someone other than AT&T implements it, so those of us who live in the Bay Area or New York City can actually use it.
On a more serious note, if wireless clothing becomes a tool for remotely monitoring medical status, doesn't this open carriers up to potential lawsuits when their network fails and someone dies of treatable maladies as a result?
If you have these ideas of profiting from providing people with better technology - learn Mandarin.
Okay, now I'm double-posting, but I just couldn't resist: do you really think that China is more of a free market than the United States? Do you really think their government just stays out of the way and never micromanages anything? China may be notorious for letting employers treat workers like cattle and generate massive amounts of industrial pollution, but that's not the same as having a laissez-faire economy.
I usually ignore your free-market trolling, but in this case I have some actual knowledge about how biomedical research works. Also, one of the authors already has the full paper available for download on his website. Guess who paid for it?
Still think it's great technology? (Yeah, I know - the free market would have thought of it first if the big bad government wasn't taking its money.)
There aren't many that do so because most scientists aren't charlatans. Most scientists are actually interested in the truth.
It's actually kind of depressing how these arguments unfold. One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is the chorus of claims that mainstream academics (and funding agencies) are biased against whatever theory is being pushed. The fact that nearly the entire scientific community rejects these theories is taken to be self-evident proof of groupthink, a conspiracy of silence*, or pure profiteering. In some fields, many of the loudest complaints come from people who've never actually done much research themselves, probably because actual science is far too demoralizing for someone who relies on faith to guide their beliefs. Very few creationists have ever worked in a biology lab, for instance - but they weasel out of this by claiming that of course the entire community is biased against them anyway, so what's the point?
(* The creationists are big fans of this; it is very common to see creationist blogs etc. hinting about tenured biology professors who know the truth, but are afraid to publish their evidence - or reveal their names, naturally - for fear that Richard Dawkins will have them rubbed out, or something equally dire. And I'm certain that in 50 years, we'll be hearing the same goddamn thing.)
MANY academics got their research grants via a government system that has preferentially given them out to studies that deal with the subject of "global warming". Regardless of the reason(s) behind that, it still amounts to a skewed expenditure of dollars... and NOT on the side of Big Oil.
You obviously didn't read the rest of my comment, so I'll restate: there is vastly more money available for promoting the continued consumption of fossil fuels. Furthermore, that money, being private revenue, is not subject to federal rules about grant money, so more of it is available to be spent taking congressmen on "fact-finding trips" to golf courses.
More to the point, if the fossil fuel industry thought there was some ironclad science that would disprove current theories about AGW, they have plenty of money to spend on it. The fact that they don't indicates to me that they're not that stupid, and they're spending the money elsewhere, like lobbying, and finding new gas and oil reserves (which employs many PhD holders). The Koch brothers actually did contribute $100,000 to Richard Mueller's meta-study, thinking that he'd discredit the academic consensus about temperature increase over the last 50 years. Oops.
You include that "region depopulating" bit, as if it were a "bad thing".
That's easy to say when it's not your family dying of drought-induced starvation. But what are a few dead Somalis worth compared to the comfort of running your air conditioning in the parking lot?
I am by no means convinced that there is a causation link between the two, or that most (obviously not all) of the people preaching AGW aren't doing it because they benefit from "green" research and development, which is more often than not (and unfortunately) a rip-off.
I think it bears reminding everyone, again, that the 6 of the top 10 companies in the world by revenue are oil and gas producers, and the total revenue of the fossil fuel-based energy companies is in the multiple trillions of dollars, a scale comparable to the US federal budget. This is at least two orders of magnitude more money than the DOE's annual budget (more than a third of which is spent on nuclear security, not "green" research), and more than three orders of magnitude more than the federal government wasted on Solyndra. So even if most of the people claiming that AGW is real are doing it for the money (which is bullshit - academic scientists don't make very much, at least not compared to oil and gas company scientists), it's not exactly a level playing field.