Since when did colonization of our solar system become the yardstick for intelligence?
Well, any intelligent civilization ought to try to expand. There isn't any good reason not to.
We haven't even done that and we are positioned better for it than any other life forms out there.
Except we've only had the technology for spaceflight for about 50 years, whereas an alien civilization would have had such technology for millions of years (it seems very unlikely that an alien civilization would develop spaceflight technology at exactly the same time as us!).
Consider that the entire livable surface of Earth was covered by humans many thousands of years ago. Within a few million years, that should be the case for the entire galaxy. If other intelligent species existed, wouldn't the have done the same thing before?
Yes, but what if we instead define "chaos" as "energy over quantity times temperature" (with quantity given in moles)? You ought to learn a bit about physics before you say it's wrong.
I think Slashdot has had stories about the upcoming Kramnik-Fritz match for over a year now, and there have been at least four of them. Is this match ever going to actually happen, or what?
Of course ION engines have ISP values of roughly 5,000-6,000 and fusion another magnitude greater, etc. Still lots of room for improvement.
Yeah, except ion engines don't work at all in an atmosphere, and scramjets only work in an atmosphere; they're two totally different systems for totally different purposes. Also, ion engines need an external power source, which increases vehicle mass, while scramjets are self-powered.
Fusion engines could potentially replace all propulsion we use now, sure, but we don't have fusion engines, and it's uncertain whether we'll ever be able to build a small enough fusion engine to fit on any spaceship smaller than a few thousand kilograms. And even then, you still need some reaction mass, just like in a nuclear thermal rocket. What should you use as reaction mass? Well, if you're in the atmosphere, you could use air. Kind of like a scramjet.
Of course, we could build a fusion pulse rocket right now. Just get a huge bowl, with shock absorbers and a spaceship above it, and explode a few hydrogen bombs underneath.
An interstellar colony ship wouldn't need to be anywhere near the size of a planet to be reasonably self-sufficient. The only things you'd really need to worry about would be propulsion and energy, as with sufficient energy you could grow food under artificial lighting.
And propulsion and energy aren't all that hard to generate. First of all you could pack lots of antimatter (manufactured on Earth or wherever). Failing that, you could pack deuterium and tritium for fusion reactors. Failing that, you could pack Uranium-235. If you wanted you could build a big sail around the asteroid. Mirror-coat one side and put solar panels on the other.
And people most certainly would want to disembark at the destination. Why? Overcrowding. Plus they'd be running out of antimatter/deuterium/uranium.
It should be noted that complex life probably evolved not once but at least twice on Earth. The Ediacarans (Check it) are believed to be the first multicellular organisms, but they are not the ancestors of any currently-living kingdom. They first showed up about 50 million years before the Cambrian explosion. They vanished somewhat mysteriously. Some believe they were gobbled up by the first animals.
Construx Semi-Automatic and Gatling Gun
on
Lego Trebuchet
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've made some pretty badass weapons with Construx. They shouldn't be too hard to replicate with other building systems, if anyone's interested in doing so.
| | ___| |__ ________ =====|
Okay, so basically what this is supposed to look like is two hollow tubes that are connected like a T, open at both ends. Then there's a plunger sorta thing. You insert it into the tube and attach it with a few rubber bands, so when you pull it back and let go it goes back into the tube.
When the plunger is in its normal position inside the bottom tube, it's blocking the intersection. So drop a bunch of marbles (or whatever projectiles you like) into the top tube. They should be slightly less wide than the tube itself. When you pull the plunger out, one projectile falls into the bottom tube. Let go of the plunger and it hits the marble, shooting it out the other end of the bottom tube.
I've built and fired many of these. They work very well. The one serious drawback is that there are problems firing them at angles too far from the horizontal.
Here's how to turn that semi-automatic into a gatling gun.
| | ___| |__ ________ =====|---( o )
Okay, if the illustration is a bit unclear, this is a wheel behind the gun. On the edge of the wheel is a small rod. One end of a string is affixed to it, the other to the plunger. Now you can operate the weapon by turning the wheel. The wheel has to be attached to the gun by some structure along the side which doesn't interfere with anything.
You should put a handle that turns the wheel from the other side. If you use a gearset that allows you several shots per revolution, you'll have something resembling a gatling gun in action.
The metric unit for time is the second. This new unit may be useful in a base-10 system, but don't call it metric. In fact, if you replaced the second with a new unit for time, you would have to change the entire metric system.
For example, the newton (kg * m/s^2) would need to be replaced, because it is based on the second. So would the joule (N * m), because it is based on the meter, which is based on the second. So would the volt (J/C), because it is based on the joule, which is based on the newton, which is based on the second.
IMHO, there's no problem with the second. Our units don't need to be based on properties of this one planet. In a few hundred years few people will know or care how the unit of time relates to an earth day. If we really used metric time, we wouldn't even need minutes or hours or weeks or months (though days and years would still be meaningful). We'd talk about seconds and kiloseconds and megaseconds.
It's Ironic that the government would fight so hard to get a moon rock back. Cuz NASA has many tons of moon rocks sitting in storage, untouched since 1970.
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think 3D TV will ever become popular. Something like a holodeck might, where you're inside the simulation, but a 3-dimensional set that you look at from outside probably won't.
I say this because 2D and 3D images are really very similar unless you move your head around, and most people don't want to move their heads around. When people sit down to watch TV, they generally want to just sit there and do nothing.
and you'll find that even if the propellant consists of a single atom the forward velocity of the nanobot will be somewhere in the region of 1/100th of the speed of light. That may not sound like much, but even 1/1000 * 3e8 m/s = 3e5 m/s = 300 km/s = 1080000 km/h!
You haven't given us the mass of the nanobot, the mass of the atom (they're not all the same, you know), or the exhaust velocity of the atom. Your calculations are without basis.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why Winamp has all those visualization plugins.
Who's as big as western Europe? You are! You are!
Since when did colonization of our solar system become the yardstick for intelligence?
Well, any intelligent civilization ought to try to expand. There isn't any good reason not to.
We haven't even done that and we are positioned better for it than any other life forms out there.
Except we've only had the technology for spaceflight for about 50 years, whereas an alien civilization would have had such technology for millions of years (it seems very unlikely that an alien civilization would develop spaceflight technology at exactly the same time as us!).
Consider that the entire livable surface of Earth was covered by humans many thousands of years ago. Within a few million years, that should be the case for the entire galaxy. If other intelligent species existed, wouldn't the have done the same thing before?
Dude, if we can send a capsule with two guys to the moon, we could much more easily send a (relatively lightweight) nuclear warhead.
But if intelligent life exists elsewhere, why hasn't it colonized our solar system millions of years ago? It's not arrogant, it's sensible.
Yes, but what if we instead define "chaos" as "energy over quantity times temperature" (with quantity given in moles)? You ought to learn a bit about physics before you say it's wrong.
But then he'd have to rewrite humans if he wanted to put them in a universe running on a different type of processor.
Yeah, and it probably disqualifies quite a few pilots, too.
I think Slashdot has had stories about the upcoming Kramnik-Fritz match for over a year now, and there have been at least four of them. Is this match ever going to actually happen, or what?
Ack, sorry, the hydrogen bomb is efficient (sorta), but not self-sustaining. I suppose the sun is self-sustaining tho, but that doesn't really count.
It's called a "hydrogen bomb."
Maybe he lives in the southern hemisphere. Then he'd go north to reach the equator.
If you're using them for surveillance, there's not much point in putting 5 of them in right next to each other. They'd all get the same data.
Of course ION engines have ISP values of roughly 5,000-6,000 and fusion another magnitude greater, etc. Still lots of room for improvement.
Yeah, except ion engines don't work at all in an atmosphere, and scramjets only work in an atmosphere; they're two totally different systems for totally different purposes. Also, ion engines need an external power source, which increases vehicle mass, while scramjets are self-powered.
Fusion engines could potentially replace all propulsion we use now, sure, but we don't have fusion engines, and it's uncertain whether we'll ever be able to build a small enough fusion engine to fit on any spaceship smaller than a few thousand kilograms. And even then, you still need some reaction mass, just like in a nuclear thermal rocket. What should you use as reaction mass? Well, if you're in the atmosphere, you could use air. Kind of like a scramjet.
Of course, we could build a fusion pulse rocket right now. Just get a huge bowl, with shock absorbers and a spaceship above it, and explode a few hydrogen bombs underneath.
"I lost 30 kilos on the new Podkletnov WEIGHT (not mass) loss program"
The kilogram is a unit of mass, not weight. It would have made more sense to say '300 newtons' or '60 pounds.'
An interstellar colony ship wouldn't need to be anywhere near the size of a planet to be reasonably self-sufficient. The only things you'd really need to worry about would be propulsion and energy, as with sufficient energy you could grow food under artificial lighting.
And propulsion and energy aren't all that hard to generate. First of all you could pack lots of antimatter (manufactured on Earth or wherever). Failing that, you could pack deuterium and tritium for fusion reactors. Failing that, you could pack Uranium-235. If you wanted you could build a big sail around the asteroid. Mirror-coat one side and put solar panels on the other.
And people most certainly would want to disembark at the destination. Why? Overcrowding. Plus they'd be running out of antimatter/deuterium/uranium.
It should be noted that complex life probably evolved not once but at least twice on Earth. The Ediacarans (Check it) are believed to be the first multicellular organisms, but they are not the ancestors of any currently-living kingdom. They first showed up about 50 million years before the Cambrian explosion. They vanished somewhat mysteriously. Some believe they were gobbled up by the first animals.
I've made some pretty badass weapons with Construx. They shouldn't be too hard to replicate with other building systems, if anyone's interested in doing so.
| |
___| |__
________ =====|
Okay, so basically what this is supposed to look like is two hollow tubes that are connected like a T, open at both ends. Then there's a plunger sorta thing. You insert it into the tube and attach it with a few rubber bands, so when you pull it back and let go it goes back into the tube.
When the plunger is in its normal position inside the bottom tube, it's blocking the intersection. So drop a bunch of marbles (or whatever projectiles you like) into the top tube. They should be slightly less wide than the tube itself. When you pull the plunger out, one projectile falls into the bottom tube. Let go of the plunger and it hits the marble, shooting it out the other end of the bottom tube.
I've built and fired many of these. They work very well. The one serious drawback is that there are problems firing them at angles too far from the horizontal.
Here's how to turn that semi-automatic into a gatling gun.
| |
___| |__
________ =====|---( o )
Okay, if the illustration is a bit unclear, this is a wheel behind the gun. On the edge of the wheel is a small rod. One end of a string is affixed to it, the other to the plunger. Now you can operate the weapon by turning the wheel. The wheel has to be attached to the gun by some structure along the side which doesn't interfere with anything.
You should put a handle that turns the wheel from the other side. If you use a gearset that allows you several shots per revolution, you'll have something resembling a gatling gun in action.
Argh, should've seen that. Should be: So would the joule (N * m), because it is based on the newton
The metric unit for time is the second. This new unit may be useful in a base-10 system, but don't call it metric. In fact, if you replaced the second with a new unit for time, you would have to change the entire metric system.
For example, the newton (kg * m/s^2) would need to be replaced, because it is based on the second. So would the joule (N * m), because it is based on the meter, which is based on the second. So would the volt (J/C), because it is based on the joule, which is based on the newton, which is based on the second.
IMHO, there's no problem with the second. Our units don't need to be based on properties of this one planet. In a few hundred years few people will know or care how the unit of time relates to an earth day. If we really used metric time, we wouldn't even need minutes or hours or weeks or months (though days and years would still be meaningful). We'd talk about seconds and kiloseconds and megaseconds.
It's Ironic that the government would fight so hard to get a moon rock back. Cuz NASA has many tons of moon rocks sitting in storage, untouched since 1970.
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think 3D TV will ever become popular. Something like a holodeck might, where you're inside the simulation, but a 3-dimensional set that you look at from outside probably won't.
I say this because 2D and 3D images are really very similar unless you move your head around, and most people don't want to move their heads around. When people sit down to watch TV, they generally want to just sit there and do nothing.
anything heavier than air WILL NOT fly
Nobody ever believed that. We've always known that birds can fly, and they're heavier than air.
Plug these numbers in
What numbers? You haven't given any numbers.
and you'll find that even if the propellant consists of a single atom the forward velocity of the nanobot will be somewhere in the region of 1/100th of the speed of light. That may not sound like much, but even 1/1000 * 3e8 m/s = 3e5 m/s = 300 km/s = 1080000 km/h!
You haven't given us the mass of the nanobot, the mass of the atom (they're not all the same, you know), or the exhaust velocity of the atom. Your calculations are without basis.
Dumbass.
A Turing machine is any machine that can perfectly emulate any other Turing machine.
Well, at this very moment I'm using the universe to emulate a Pentium II. And my mom is downstairs, emulating a G3.