I'm not sure, but might some of the geoengineering approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere considerably accelerate your estimate? Like for example, iron-fertilizing the oceans to create massive plankton blooms that, hopefully, remove carbon faster?
Not that I'm sure that the proposed geogengineering approaches are GOOD IDEAS, I'm just wondering if reducing CO2 could be done quicker.
Some people are claiming that all spaceflight knowledge in this country has been lost and it would cost far more (in constant dollars?) to re-do what was done in the 60's to get us to the moon. I'm not so sure.
I'm working in an engineering field (not rocket science) which was dominated by experimentation/prototyping when it was "hot" (WWII and shortly thereafter). Giant teams of people (100s or more) would be doing what our very small team is today (3-ish).
Granted, we have their shoulders to stand on, but instead of doing a WHOLE LOT of prototypes, we run supercomputer simulations and "try out" thousands of designs. And when we build them, they work--the first time.
I would say we re-do (sort of, actually we're pushing today's technological boundaries) the equivalent of what our fathers and grandfathers had done, faster, cheaper, better, and with stupider, less-skilled people (I'm including myself) --because we have better tools to extend our minds and bodies with today.
So I am not so sure that re-engineering the Apollo program would cost anything like the original development program. I think it would depend on what kind of modeling tools and other tech developments are available now that didn't exist then.
What's more, we're currently executing what I would call an "archaeology" project, reviving a 40-year-old design. The existing documentation is lacking, but it's still helping us a lot--we'll probably get this thing built for 1/10th the cost "back when" thanks to what our ancestors have left us and thanks to the tools we have today. And we might even build it better than they could ever have done, thanks to being able to use supercomputers to search for an optimal design.... But that remains to be seen.
We're already in a mass extinction event. We're wiping out species at a pace that, in a geological-time sense, is indistinguishable from a big asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruption.
And yes, humans are moronic. The kind of investment in humanity's immortality probably won't be made until someone has conquered the entire planet and subjugated the people to such an extent that he doesn't need a huge military budget--and then the effort will be made only if that is the world leader's whim, instead of, say, constructing monuments to himself.
I'm boycotting ALL music purchase until it reaches $0.1/song. And yes, I'm aware that Russian music sellers are at or below that price point, and NO, I won't use 'em, because I've also read that the Russians don't compensate artists except in the merest token sense. The only legitimate US sellers are selling at around $1/song.
I also DO NOT pirate music. The music industry can either get $0.1 from me or 0. I don't *need* music.
I wonder how much revenue they could get at lower prices?
Imagine any conventional object up in the sky. A sitting duck for your laser, right? Even mach 10 is pretty much stationary compared to 3e8 m/s.
But what if that autonomous drone is flying 2 feet off the ground using its inhumanly fast reaction time and 36g turning capability to fly at that altitude--i.e., it's below the horizon until it's right on top of your laser facility.
Drones could survive battlefield lasers, maybe: piloted jets, not so much.
I hope you're joking? GPS can be hacked just like anything else, or jammed. GPS controls like you propose would be about as secure as a sign on your house "BEWARE OF DOG".
Fighting a government? This guy murdered some cop's innocent kid and the cop's kid's fiancee. This wasn't collateral damage or some kind of mistake. He stalked them and murdered them.
How is that any sort of legitimate fight against a government?
It adds up--what if I'm in line with my bomb (a 2 1/2 year-old) who is going to go off any second and start screaming. The people in front of me all use cash, 30 seconds each, and I'm behind 3 people. And then I use cash. Two minutes is an eternity to a 2 and a half-year-old, and a minute in line with a screaming 2.5-year-old is an eternity for everyone around.
So, when the people in the US realize that places like Turkey are banning the teaching of evolution, will they then associate such bans with being ignorant and fundamentalist? (And hopefully stop supporting such bans in the US?)
Probably vaccine development, antibiotic development, and curable disease drug development ought to be run BY the people FOR the people. I.e., Government support of the research and development.
It would also lessen the motivation to pass off bad drugs onto the people for profit.
It's pretty insane that the US has a $600B military budget, when less than 10k people in the US die a year from hostile military action of any sort, yet 100k-ish US-ians die every year from antibiotic-resistant bugs. Can we have $100B/year for antibiotic development, please? If we were rational, we would probably swap the defense and medical research budgets!
Just to amplify your comment with a list, all herpes infections are lifelong and incurable, and chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are becoming drug-resistant.
Furthermore, even if you manage to be cured of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, you could still suffer permanent damage from having been infected.
Nevertheless, despite the latent DNA in cells, people have been completely cured of HIV.
Perhaps there are drugs which reverse latency and "flag" infected cells to be killed?
I think, in the case of tuberculosis, a drug which does that would shorten treatment. The TB mycobacterium, if I remember right, goes dormant with not much metabolic activity, hence why you must have a months-long treatment regimen for a cure. If you can force the TB to "wake up", then you can kill it off quicker with other drugs and shorten the treatment regimen.
If you can force latent HIV to "wake up", then maybe you could cure someone in a relatively short time.
A question I wonder about---I guess "10-30 petaflop" of a standard multi-core architecture would require > 1M computational cores. Suppose you're running a code on 500,000 cores.
What is the mean time to failure of a core or some other piece of hardware required for that core to work? With 500k cores, I'd expect one to die every few hours or even minutes. Either that, or a random bit-flip from a cosmic ray.
Given that, how do you finish a computation that takes more than an hour or so? And how do you guarantee the integrity of that computation?
D'you have three cores working every piece of the problem, and have them "vote" on the result, taking the majority opinion in the INEVITABLE case of disagreement? That sort of implies that to have 10 petaflop of effective computing power, you need 30 petaflop of actual computing power, + all the overhead/hardware required for voting.
Integrity of the results for such large computations just seems like a very difficult problem!
A baseball, per google search, weighs about.142kg and a 120mph baseball is going about 53m/s.
0.5 * mass * velocity^2 gives about 200J.
200J / 1.6e-19 gives around 1.24 x 10^21 eV.
The LHC's protons top out at around 7TeV, or 7 x 10^12.
Your estimate of the LHC's proton energy, sir, is off by a factor of something like 1.78 x 10^8, or in words, by a factor of 178 million, depending on what you think of as a "fast" baseball! (Unless you think of a baseball moving at.009mph as fast?)
Perhaps you were thinking of some cosmic rays, which are reputed to have that much energy? There are cosmic rays that have had 50J of energy, or about energy of a 60mph baseball. But the LHC has about a factor of 10 million to go to reach that class of energy!
I like to donate for immunizations and medical research into things like alzheimers and autoimmune disease. Alzheimers has a tremendous societal cost because it doesn't just kill, it expensively disables. Autoimmune disease is just a huge source of misery and disability to people who would otherwise be fine.
I don't think I've donated to cancer research recently, because, frankly, there've been great strides made against it and lifestyle changes can reduce your risk a huge amount.
The reason I donate to those causes instead of relief charities is I think there is more misery reduction per buck, especially for childhood immunizations. I wonder what the payoff is vs. the cost for having eradicated smallpox? A million to one?
In space, presumably you could keep the coils cool with minimal energy cost, so you just spin up the fields once and then presumably pay a small cost in maintenance?
Fix the people. Re-engineer people so we don't need: 1) High temperatures 2) Oxygen 3) Liquid water 4) Carbon-based food as an energy source 5) Shielding from cosmic rays 6) Gravity 7) High pressure 8) Fast travel times (i.e., much longer shelf life for people)
A solid-state person who is radiation tolerant and built to subsist on low levels of solar radiation and live in a low temp/low pressure space environment would be *much* better suited to space. And once you're suited to space, why, why EVER go back down onto a planet? Oh, and if your primary brain is destroyed by the impact of a micrometeoroid, just boot up your backup! Go set up civilization in the asteroid belt, and go to sleep while you go over to the next star system!
Another poster very ably picked apart your proposal that we use the Tevatron instead.
As for observing high energy atmospheric collisions, no, that won't work either. I've seen the detector at SLAC's linear accelerator. It's as big as an office building. It is truly an awesome sight.
You not only have to have high energy events happen, you have to have a very sophisticated detector built around where the event will happen in order to learn anything from it. Then, you probably need billions and billions of collisions, only some of which yield the reactions you're looking for, in order to get good enough statistics to have *any* certainty about what you've found.
As if that weren't enough, another characteristic of atmospheric collisions is that any high energy particle quickly generates a cascade, a shower, of lower energy particles. This creates quite a soupy mess and detangling the event you're looking for from this is just mind-blowingly difficult.
I do believe that it's already quite a challenging task to figure out what happened even in the relatively clean environment of the LHC. With the LHC comes a huge amount of supercomputing power and decades of code development. The LHC's page lists the Grid supercomputer they use as "the most powerful supercomputer in the world".
You may want to entertain the notion that perhaps using the LHC instead of trying to observe natural reactions is in fact the cheapest, fastest, and best way to do the physics desired.....
Slashdot Mirror
So, um, you want your government meat inspector to be an unpaid volunteer? What if no one wants to do that job as a volunteer?
Like Salmonella, e. coli, listeria much?
And do you want a "volunteer" from the banking industry regulating--the banking industry?
I for one want the Government to pay those in Government positions, because guess what, if the Government isn't paying them, well, SOMEONE ELSE will.
--PM
I'm not sure, but might some of the geoengineering approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere considerably accelerate your estimate? Like for example, iron-fertilizing the oceans to create massive plankton blooms that, hopefully, remove carbon faster?
Not that I'm sure that the proposed geogengineering approaches are GOOD IDEAS, I'm just wondering if reducing CO2 could be done quicker.
--PM
Hello,
Some people are claiming that all spaceflight knowledge in this country has been lost and it would cost far more (in constant dollars?) to re-do what was done in the 60's to get us to the moon. I'm not so sure.
I'm working in an engineering field (not rocket science) which was dominated by experimentation/prototyping when it was "hot" (WWII and shortly thereafter). Giant teams of people (100s or more) would be doing what our very small team is today (3-ish).
Granted, we have their shoulders to stand on, but instead of doing a WHOLE LOT of prototypes, we run supercomputer simulations and "try out" thousands of designs. And when we build them, they work--the first time.
I would say we re-do (sort of, actually we're pushing today's technological boundaries) the equivalent of what our fathers and grandfathers had done, faster, cheaper, better, and with stupider, less-skilled people (I'm including myself) --because we have better tools to extend our minds and bodies with today.
So I am not so sure that re-engineering the Apollo program would cost anything like the original development program. I think it would depend on what kind of modeling tools and other tech developments are available now that didn't exist then.
What's more, we're currently executing what I would call an "archaeology" project, reviving a 40-year-old design. The existing documentation is lacking, but it's still helping us a lot--we'll probably get this thing built for 1/10th the cost "back when" thanks to what our ancestors have left us and thanks to the tools we have today. And we might even build it better than they could ever have done, thanks to being able to use supercomputers to search for an optimal design.... But that remains to be seen.
--PeterM
We're already in a mass extinction event. We're wiping out species at a pace that, in a geological-time sense, is indistinguishable from a big asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruption.
And yes, humans are moronic. The kind of investment in humanity's immortality probably won't be made until someone has conquered the entire planet and subjugated the people to such an extent that he doesn't need a huge military budget--and then the effort will be made only if that is the world leader's whim, instead of, say, constructing monuments to himself.
--PM
Of everything I've read, I thnk yours is the most reasonable idea. Just stamp it with the identity of who you sold it to. Brilliant.
"This copy licensed to....".
It's easily defeated, but as people said, someone determined will defeat anything you come up with.
Since I don't have mod points, this is what you get!
--PM
My price isn't $1/song, it's $0.1/song.
I'm boycotting ALL music purchase until it reaches $0.1/song.
And yes, I'm aware that Russian music sellers are at or below that price point, and NO, I won't use 'em, because I've also read that the Russians don't compensate artists except in the merest token sense. The only legitimate US sellers are selling at around $1/song.
I also DO NOT pirate music. The music industry can either get $0.1 from me or 0. I don't *need* music.
I wonder how much revenue they could get at lower prices?
--PM
Imagine any conventional object up in the sky. A sitting duck for your laser, right? Even mach 10 is pretty much stationary compared to 3e8 m/s.
But what if that autonomous drone is flying 2 feet off the ground using its inhumanly fast reaction time and 36g turning capability to fly at that altitude--i.e., it's below the horizon until it's right on top of your laser facility.
Drones could survive battlefield lasers, maybe: piloted jets, not so much.
--PM
I hope you're joking? GPS can be hacked just like anything else, or jammed. GPS controls like you propose would be about as secure as a sign on your house "BEWARE OF DOG".
--PM
Are you making fan blades for a jet engine? Why is gamma titanium aluminide hard to work with?
Fighting a government? This guy murdered some cop's innocent kid and the cop's kid's fiancee. This wasn't collateral damage or some kind of mistake. He stalked them and murdered them.
How is that any sort of legitimate fight against a government?
--PM
Just curious, what do you do when all the vendors in an area have screwed you over? Do without critical hardware?
Hello,
I've shopped at retailers who post signs asking people not to use credit cards so they can keep prices low.
At those retailers I respect that and use cash. Try it, it might help you a bit. I also try to make it a habit to tip in cash.
Best,
--PM
It adds up--what if I'm in line with my bomb (a 2 1/2 year-old) who is going to go off any second and start screaming. The people in front of me all use cash, 30 seconds each, and I'm behind 3 people. And then I use cash. Two minutes is an eternity to a 2 and a half-year-old, and a minute in line with a screaming 2.5-year-old is an eternity for everyone around.
Swipe/leave is very nice.
--PM
So, when the people in the US realize that places like Turkey are banning the teaching of evolution, will they then associate such bans with being ignorant and fundamentalist? (And hopefully stop supporting such bans in the US?)
--PeterM
Syphilis kills, too. And if you get herpes in your eyes, it can make you blind.
I admit they're not as deadly as AIDS, though, so quibbles aside, you do have a point.
--PM
Probably vaccine development, antibiotic development, and curable disease drug development ought to be run BY the people FOR the people. I.e., Government support of the research and development.
It would also lessen the motivation to pass off bad drugs onto the people for profit.
It's pretty insane that the US has a $600B military budget, when less than 10k people in the US die a year from hostile military action of any sort, yet 100k-ish US-ians die every year from antibiotic-resistant bugs. Can we have $100B/year for antibiotic development, please? If we were rational, we would probably swap the defense and medical research budgets!
--PM
Just to amplify your comment with a list,
all herpes infections are lifelong and incurable,
and chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are becoming
drug-resistant.
Furthermore, even if you manage to be cured of
chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, you could still
suffer permanent damage from having been infected.
--PM
Nevertheless, despite the latent DNA in cells, people have been completely cured of HIV.
Perhaps there are drugs which reverse latency and "flag" infected cells to be killed?
I think, in the case of tuberculosis, a drug which does that would shorten treatment. The TB mycobacterium, if I remember right, goes dormant with not much metabolic activity, hence why you must have a months-long treatment regimen for a cure. If you can force the TB to "wake up", then you can kill it off quicker with other drugs and shorten the treatment regimen.
If you can force latent HIV to "wake up", then maybe you could cure someone in a relatively short time.
--PM
Maybe that method is true, but it seems to be seldom tried!
--PM
A question I wonder about---I guess "10-30 petaflop" of a standard multi-core architecture would require > 1M computational cores. Suppose you're running a code on 500,000 cores.
What is the mean time to failure of a core or some other piece of hardware required for that core to work? With 500k cores, I'd expect one to die every few hours or even minutes. Either that, or a random bit-flip from a cosmic ray.
Given that, how do you finish a computation that takes more than an hour or so? And how do you guarantee the integrity of that computation?
D'you have three cores working every piece of the problem, and have them "vote" on the result, taking the majority opinion in the INEVITABLE case of disagreement? That sort of implies that to have 10 petaflop of effective computing power, you need 30 petaflop of actual computing power, + all the overhead/hardware required for voting.
Integrity of the results for such large computations just seems like a very difficult problem!
--PM
A baseball, per google search, weighs about .142kg and a 120mph baseball is going about 53m/s.
0.5 * mass * velocity^2 gives about 200J.
200J / 1.6e-19 gives around 1.24 x 10^21 eV.
The LHC's protons top out at around 7TeV, or 7 x 10^12.
Your estimate of the LHC's proton energy, sir, is off by a factor of something like 1.78 x 10^8, or in words, by a factor of 178 million, depending on what you think of as a "fast" baseball! (Unless you think of a baseball moving at .009mph as fast?)
Perhaps you were thinking of some cosmic rays, which are reputed to have that much energy? There are cosmic rays that have had 50J of energy, or about energy of a 60mph baseball. But the LHC has about a factor of 10 million to go to reach that class of energy!
--PM
I like to donate for immunizations and medical research into things like alzheimers and autoimmune disease. Alzheimers has a tremendous societal cost because it doesn't just kill, it expensively disables. Autoimmune disease is just a huge source of misery and disability to people who would otherwise be fine.
I don't think I've donated to cancer research recently, because, frankly, there've been great strides made against it and lifestyle changes can reduce your risk a huge amount.
The reason I donate to those causes instead of relief charities is I think there is more misery reduction per buck, especially for childhood immunizations. I wonder what the payoff is vs. the cost for having eradicated smallpox? A million to one?
--PM
In space, presumably you could keep the coils cool with minimal energy cost, so you just spin up the fields once and then presumably pay a small cost in maintenance?
--PM
Fix the people.
Re-engineer people so we don't need:
1) High temperatures
2) Oxygen
3) Liquid water
4) Carbon-based food as an energy source
5) Shielding from cosmic rays
6) Gravity
7) High pressure
8) Fast travel times (i.e., much longer shelf life for people)
A solid-state person who is radiation tolerant and built to subsist on low levels of solar radiation and live in a low temp/low pressure space environment would be *much* better suited to space. And once you're suited to space, why, why EVER go back down onto a planet? Oh, and if your primary brain is destroyed by the impact of a micrometeoroid, just boot up your backup! Go set up civilization in the asteroid belt, and go to sleep while you go over to the next star system!
--PM
Another poster very ably picked apart your proposal that we use the Tevatron instead.
As for observing high energy atmospheric collisions, no, that won't work either. I've seen the detector at SLAC's linear accelerator. It's as big as an office building. It is truly an awesome sight.
You not only have to have high energy events happen, you have to have a very sophisticated detector built around where the event will happen in order to learn anything from it. Then, you probably need billions and billions of collisions, only some of which yield the reactions you're looking for, in order to get good enough statistics to have *any* certainty about what you've found.
As if that weren't enough, another characteristic of atmospheric collisions is that any high energy particle quickly generates a cascade, a shower, of lower energy particles. This creates quite a soupy mess and detangling the event you're looking for from this is just mind-blowingly difficult.
I do believe that it's already quite a challenging task to figure out what happened even in the relatively clean environment of the LHC. With the LHC comes a huge amount of supercomputing power and decades of code development. The LHC's page lists the Grid supercomputer they use as "the most powerful supercomputer in the world".
You may want to entertain the notion that perhaps using the LHC instead of trying to observe natural reactions is in fact the cheapest, fastest, and best way to do the physics desired.....
--PM