If not, go read up on the "Prisoner's Dilemma", or in this case: "If alien civilisation exists that could potentially wipe me out, then I should wipe them out first, thoroughly and completely, or make sure I have something off-planet than can wipe them out in case they target Earth." (Also note: any civilisation who can go interstellar can by definition wipe out whatever planet is at the other end - it's actually a lot easier than a friendly visit).
There are some other interesting answers to the "planetary prisoner's dilemma" that don't necessarily end in genocide (e.g. whether one or other side has alternative colonial bases, whether one thinks that the other might have alternative bases, whether one has hidden weapons waiting closer to the target system, whether an alien civilisation has utterly alien concepts of value and ethics that lead to totally different conclusions, cultural vs biological preservation as paramount...) Generally, if we found something, I would be wanting to get off-planet as soon as possible, and being as friendly as possible in the mean time. Considering that an "answer" to us saying hello would be on the order of decades at the closest, establishing an offworld presence in that time isn't so unlikely (just in case they decide to answer with a stellar-magnitude directed burst of gamma rays).
It's a little hard to fight off something like a directed burst of energy from your planet, or a relativistic kill vehicle.
This goes both ways: yes, belief in one area of the "paranormal" is more likely to mean belief in others whereas a more "scientific" mind is less likely to believe in any of them, but at the same time, there are theological implications of finding life outside Earth that get tricky (e.g. if Jesus died for all humanity, did he also die for all alien life? Did Jesus appear as an alien as well, but if so, then creation isn't totally under the effect of Adam's sin... etc). They're not intractable problems, but it gets complex (if we found aliens tomorrow, a lot of monotheistic religions would empty out somewhat, but others would shrug and go, "Huh, God created aliens as well - weird but cool.") Most Christians I know don't believe in aliens.
As a Christian (and an engineer) myself, I'm of the opinion, "I doubt there's aliens out there, but I'm not going to lose my faith if there are. Means I made a couple of wrong assumptions, but it's irrelevant to the core of what I believe."
Of course, one of the first things I would be interested to see would be the range of spiritual beliefs of an alien race - if they believed a direct translation into their culture of (say) the Christian God, then atheists could have a big problem on their hands.:-)
In theory, you could probably do this by simply opening one end of the sphere. It would be horribly slow to accelerate, but should work (making bold assumptions about sphere stability etc...) If you had something a bit more like half a sphere that was somewhat reflective,* you'd probably get yourself a good bit of speed up after a while (not human-lifetime timescales though, but neither is building one).
*Getting it to balance pressure from solar wind and pull from gravity and blah blah and stay on one side the whole time would be a mind-bending exercise, but probably not much more difficult than actually making a functioning Dyson Sphere in the first place. A bunch of heliostats could work though.
Oh, and you wouldn't want to get too close to whatever star system you were planning on visiting, either!
Offtopic, but why are us "science types" not the ones going for leadership positions? I think engineers and scientists should be the ones getting into positions of power and making big decisions.
You are correct in thinking that the population should stabilise somewhere (cf. this), as the second differential of population growth has been negative for some time (i.e. population is growing, but the rate of growth is steadily decreasing). But, there is also a high likelihood that we are going to hit the Earth's population carrying capacity well before then - some argue that we're already at it, only propped up by artificially increasing crop yields etc by fossil-fuel-derived fertilisers etc - when those fuels run out (which they will), most of humanity stops eating...
So, we will slow down at some point, but possibly not soon enough.
Also, note the similarity of the (mid-estimate) graph on that Wikipedia page to an S-curve (typical of populations with an imposed limit).
This is actually a good point, as the tend is for a society's fertility rates to drop as it becomes more developed (specifically, as women become more educated), and may Western nations are either in decline, or only growing because of immigration. Realistically - and somewhat surprisingly - if we want to solve global overpopulation, our best bet is to educate women (which also means: fix poverty first...) I'm happy to stop at 2 kids though.
Depends on resource use: if you live like the average American, theoretically Earth can support about 1 billion. If you live like the average Indian, about 10 billion, like the average Rwandan, about 12 billion. Being that most of the world is trying to live more like America than Rwanda, at 7 billion, we have a big problem.
Overpopulation is not just about the area you physically occupy, but the land use required to support your living - do your grow your own food, mine your own metals, produce your own energy?
Yes - all of our energy sources are ultimately solar (e.g. oil: solar --> plants --> buried and degrades to oil). The only arguable exception is nuclear, but even then, if you follow current ideas on where higher elements are formed, it's still from a star...
Agreed - there is a limit to the usefulness of energy you get out of a collection system. Also, I note that everyone here is assuming that a civilization would *want* to extract all available energy? What's to say you actually have a use for it all and don't want to dump some? Also, what of the waste heat from whatever (presumably very considerable) industry you have in place to use said energy?
So yeah, it's probably a waste of time looking for Dyson spheres, but hey, we might learn something else from the data. And, if we do happen to actually find something...?
You make a good point and follow sensible logic, but I'm not sure you realise your starting assumptions, particularly those about God's motivations - what if God's intention in people praying (and, perhaps, in creating the universe in the first place) is more about training up said people rather than making the world "good" by our subjective measure? What if reality as we know it is only a training ground? (For what, I have no idea, but it's an interesting concept). As a parent, I'm more concerned about the development of my kids' character than the specific temporal goal at hand (occasionally, them learning consequences is of more importance than getting a little hurt in the process).
Another way to do that (and I know someone who had a workplace that did, though admittedly slightly before SSDs became common) is to put rediculous amounts of RAM in the dev's machine, create a RAM disk and put the relevant parts of your source tree there for compiling. You have to have something that copies it back out to proper media once in a while, but it'd beat an SSD and have a longer lifetime (well, and cost more, but hey... trade-offs).
Will be neat when memristor-based storage comes online though.
Does the bit about the top 100 torrents being monitored imply that if you're not downloading anything from the top list, you're likely not being watched? In other words, if someone was to wait a month, rather than download something immediately, they probably wouldn't get spotted?
Not that I'm necessarily implying this is a good idea - I'm just curious. (The last thing I torrented was a LibreOffice installer - see, it does get used legitimately!:-)
Act normal, go home, post a detailed description of what you saw (preferably with phone camera evidence) publically to Facebook (and possibly elsewhere), under a title something to the effect of "Man, check out this weird thing that happened to me today!" Then carry on as if nothing happened. At this point, I would no longer be a threat any more than any one of several hundred other people who saw what I posted. (And "erasing" me would no longer benefit them any, apart from pointless retribution = cost without return).
But, perhaps because I live in New Zealand where the government is a little toothless* and there aren't any significant organised crime syndicates, I'm a little more casual than some.
(However, I would probably then quietly take my family camping, along with getting some advice from some "Apocalypse ready" buddies of mine (their words) and one or two choice others. If I had any reason to really be that paranoid - though I can't think of any reason why I would be).
Having semi-recently worked in a small computer retail store, the iPad will never be the option with the most margin for the store - Apple don't believe in giving small stores any margin (we would actually *lose* money on smaller iPods once you factored in shipping costs etc). Not that Apple would actually let us sell iPads, even though we were apparently an "Approved Partner". One got quite good at talking customers out of buying Apple products (which they were - pretty much without exception - only buying on hype anyway).
Not sure if you've been paying attention, but while certain areas (like office apps) are still strongly closed-sourced-dominated, open source has been slowly and steadily growing. Chrome is now getting bigger than IE in some places, not to mention Firefox and (webkit-based, so at least partly open) Safari; Android is a serious contender in the mobile market, and that's basically a specialised version of Linux. Open/LibreOffice too has increased it's market share significantly, and as mentioned by others, can do most of what most people need, so it's not hard to get people to use it.
The web isn't the only place where writing raw HTML+CSS is useful - take ebooks for example. I can tell you from first-hand experience that MS Word is a bad idea for writing an ebook if you want it to involve images. But, seeing as most of the main formats basically are HTML/CSS/XML based, writing by hand is much nicer, and if you hand someone a template and some simple instructions (this is a tag, this is an end tag, use this one for a link, etc), it's not difficult (again, first-hand experience with getting my wife to edit some of her own files).
Actually, the sad truth is that's what Notepad would do with any large text documents. You laugh because your only other option would be to cry (or install a real text editor).
Actually, PowerPoint. For years (actually, I can honestly say decades now*), I've shaken my head at the terrible transitions and effects in PowerPoint, so getting something vaguely nice-looking in their presentation software is probably a good thing.
* Early 90's I saw a presentation program called "Scala" on the Amiga that had some really beautiful effects etc; it ended up morphing into something else on a different platform, but ever since then, I've cringed at nearly all the PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen.
You make a good point: an often-missed reality with any humanitarian project is making it holistic - covering all the bases. Throwing money at a problem fixes nothing, and usually makes things worse, unless you do it in a way that fits with the culture, has required infrastructure, training, follow-up, etc.
So here, the tools are great... as long as there's someone who knows how to use them, and the necessary resources available to support them, and the software for them to use, and the power and internet infrastructure, and making it available in their language, and educating them how to use them, and someone to fix them (maybe - they are tablets, after all), etc, etc.
But, I know first-hand that teaching yourself can be more effective than a standard classroom scenario (I was homeschooled), so it may well let the students bypass the useless teachers.
Actually, no. A lot of customers I had to work with would use their ISP-assigned email address and whatever mail client shipped with the machine (or was most readily available - Windows Live Mail, for example... bleck). It would be nice if these people used webmail, because then they'd not suffer quite so bad from catastrophic HDD failure. (Joe Average user not backing up is a good argument for the cloud, incidentally).
Also, if you get at all rural (I live in New Zealand and worked at a shop that served rural customers), webmail is not an option if you're on dial-up, trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
Bahahaha.
Err, you were going for the comedy angle, yeah?
If not, go read up on the "Prisoner's Dilemma", or in this case: "If alien civilisation exists that could potentially wipe me out, then I should wipe them out first, thoroughly and completely, or make sure I have something off-planet than can wipe them out in case they target Earth." (Also note: any civilisation who can go interstellar can by definition wipe out whatever planet is at the other end - it's actually a lot easier than a friendly visit).
There are some other interesting answers to the "planetary prisoner's dilemma" that don't necessarily end in genocide (e.g. whether one or other side has alternative colonial bases, whether one thinks that the other might have alternative bases, whether one has hidden weapons waiting closer to the target system, whether an alien civilisation has utterly alien concepts of value and ethics that lead to totally different conclusions, cultural vs biological preservation as paramount...) Generally, if we found something, I would be wanting to get off-planet as soon as possible, and being as friendly as possible in the mean time. Considering that an "answer" to us saying hello would be on the order of decades at the closest, establishing an offworld presence in that time isn't so unlikely (just in case they decide to answer with a stellar-magnitude directed burst of gamma rays).
It's a little hard to fight off something like a directed burst of energy from your planet, or a relativistic kill vehicle.
This goes both ways: yes, belief in one area of the "paranormal" is more likely to mean belief in others whereas a more "scientific" mind is less likely to believe in any of them, but at the same time, there are theological implications of finding life outside Earth that get tricky (e.g. if Jesus died for all humanity, did he also die for all alien life? Did Jesus appear as an alien as well, but if so, then creation isn't totally under the effect of Adam's sin... etc). They're not intractable problems, but it gets complex (if we found aliens tomorrow, a lot of monotheistic religions would empty out somewhat, but others would shrug and go, "Huh, God created aliens as well - weird but cool.") Most Christians I know don't believe in aliens.
As a Christian (and an engineer) myself, I'm of the opinion, "I doubt there's aliens out there, but I'm not going to lose my faith if there are. Means I made a couple of wrong assumptions, but it's irrelevant to the core of what I believe."
Of course, one of the first things I would be interested to see would be the range of spiritual beliefs of an alien race - if they believed a direct translation into their culture of (say) the Christian God, then atheists could have a big problem on their hands. :-)
In theory, you could probably do this by simply opening one end of the sphere. It would be horribly slow to accelerate, but should work (making bold assumptions about sphere stability etc...) If you had something a bit more like half a sphere that was somewhat reflective,* you'd probably get yourself a good bit of speed up after a while (not human-lifetime timescales though, but neither is building one).
*Getting it to balance pressure from solar wind and pull from gravity and blah blah and stay on one side the whole time would be a mind-bending exercise, but probably not much more difficult than actually making a functioning Dyson Sphere in the first place. A bunch of heliostats could work though.
Oh, and you wouldn't want to get too close to whatever star system you were planning on visiting, either!
Offtopic, but why are us "science types" not the ones going for leadership positions? I think engineers and scientists should be the ones getting into positions of power and making big decisions.
You are correct in thinking that the population should stabilise somewhere (cf. this), as the second differential of population growth has been negative for some time (i.e. population is growing, but the rate of growth is steadily decreasing). But, there is also a high likelihood that we are going to hit the Earth's population carrying capacity well before then - some argue that we're already at it, only propped up by artificially increasing crop yields etc by fossil-fuel-derived fertilisers etc - when those fuels run out (which they will), most of humanity stops eating...
So, we will slow down at some point, but possibly not soon enough.
Also, note the similarity of the (mid-estimate) graph on that Wikipedia page to an S-curve (typical of populations with an imposed limit).
This is actually a good point, as the tend is for a society's fertility rates to drop as it becomes more developed (specifically, as women become more educated), and may Western nations are either in decline, or only growing because of immigration. Realistically - and somewhat surprisingly - if we want to solve global overpopulation, our best bet is to educate women (which also means: fix poverty first...) I'm happy to stop at 2 kids though.
Average assumption on replacement level is 2.1 live births per fertile female. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
Still not sure how to get 0.1 of a kid and have it a live birth though...
And here I suggest you go hear Sir Richard Attenborough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN06tLRE4WE
Depends on resource use: if you live like the average American, theoretically Earth can support about 1 billion. If you live like the average Indian, about 10 billion, like the average Rwandan, about 12 billion. Being that most of the world is trying to live more like America than Rwanda, at 7 billion, we have a big problem.
Overpopulation is not just about the area you physically occupy, but the land use required to support your living - do your grow your own food, mine your own metals, produce your own energy?
Yes - all of our energy sources are ultimately solar (e.g. oil: solar --> plants --> buried and degrades to oil). The only arguable exception is nuclear, but even then, if you follow current ideas on where higher elements are formed, it's still from a star...
Agreed - there is a limit to the usefulness of energy you get out of a collection system. Also, I note that everyone here is assuming that a civilization would *want* to extract all available energy? What's to say you actually have a use for it all and don't want to dump some? Also, what of the waste heat from whatever (presumably very considerable) industry you have in place to use said energy?
So yeah, it's probably a waste of time looking for Dyson spheres, but hey, we might learn something else from the data. And, if we do happen to actually find something...?
You make a good point and follow sensible logic, but I'm not sure you realise your starting assumptions, particularly those about God's motivations - what if God's intention in people praying (and, perhaps, in creating the universe in the first place) is more about training up said people rather than making the world "good" by our subjective measure? What if reality as we know it is only a training ground? (For what, I have no idea, but it's an interesting concept). As a parent, I'm more concerned about the development of my kids' character than the specific temporal goal at hand (occasionally, them learning consequences is of more importance than getting a little hurt in the process).
My 2 cents anyway. :-)
...you realise they're talking USD$1/GB, not NZD$1/GB. Doh.
Still, with current exchange rates, that's not really that different any more (a.k.a. "an optimist's view of the GFC" :-)
Another way to do that (and I know someone who had a workplace that did, though admittedly slightly before SSDs became common) is to put rediculous amounts of RAM in the dev's machine, create a RAM disk and put the relevant parts of your source tree there for compiling. You have to have something that copies it back out to proper media once in a while, but it'd beat an SSD and have a longer lifetime (well, and cost more, but hey... trade-offs).
Will be neat when memristor-based storage comes online though.
He said "trusted brands"... Sorry, shameless troll, couldn't resist. ;-)
My favourite (shown to us by an organic chem lecturer): "Organic water - non carbonated"!
Does the bit about the top 100 torrents being monitored imply that if you're not downloading anything from the top list, you're likely not being watched? In other words, if someone was to wait a month, rather than download something immediately, they probably wouldn't get spotted?
Not that I'm necessarily implying this is a good idea - I'm just curious. (The last thing I torrented was a LibreOffice installer - see, it does get used legitimately! :-)
Act normal, go home, post a detailed description of what you saw (preferably with phone camera evidence) publically to Facebook (and possibly elsewhere), under a title something to the effect of "Man, check out this weird thing that happened to me today!" Then carry on as if nothing happened. At this point, I would no longer be a threat any more than any one of several hundred other people who saw what I posted. (And "erasing" me would no longer benefit them any, apart from pointless retribution = cost without return).
But, perhaps because I live in New Zealand where the government is a little toothless* and there aren't any significant organised crime syndicates, I'm a little more casual than some.
(However, I would probably then quietly take my family camping, along with getting some advice from some "Apocalypse ready" buddies of mine (their words) and one or two choice others. If I had any reason to really be that paranoid - though I can't think of any reason why I would be).
* Yeah, yeah, Kim Dotcom, I know...
Having semi-recently worked in a small computer retail store, the iPad will never be the option with the most margin for the store - Apple don't believe in giving small stores any margin (we would actually *lose* money on smaller iPods once you factored in shipping costs etc). Not that Apple would actually let us sell iPads, even though we were apparently an "Approved Partner". One got quite good at talking customers out of buying Apple products (which they were - pretty much without exception - only buying on hype anyway).
Not sure if you've been paying attention, but while certain areas (like office apps) are still strongly closed-sourced-dominated, open source has been slowly and steadily growing. Chrome is now getting bigger than IE in some places, not to mention Firefox and (webkit-based, so at least partly open) Safari; Android is a serious contender in the mobile market, and that's basically a specialised version of Linux. Open/LibreOffice too has increased it's market share significantly, and as mentioned by others, can do most of what most people need, so it's not hard to get people to use it.
The web isn't the only place where writing raw HTML+CSS is useful - take ebooks for example. I can tell you from first-hand experience that MS Word is a bad idea for writing an ebook if you want it to involve images. But, seeing as most of the main formats basically are HTML/CSS/XML based, writing by hand is much nicer, and if you hand someone a template and some simple instructions (this is a tag, this is an end tag, use this one for a link, etc), it's not difficult (again, first-hand experience with getting my wife to edit some of her own files).
Helps if you get to see the HTML colour too :-)
I know, right! ;-)
Mod parent up
Actually, the sad truth is that's what Notepad would do with any large text documents. You laugh because your only other option would be to cry (or install a real text editor).
Actually, PowerPoint. For years (actually, I can honestly say decades now*), I've shaken my head at the terrible transitions and effects in PowerPoint, so getting something vaguely nice-looking in their presentation software is probably a good thing.
* Early 90's I saw a presentation program called "Scala" on the Amiga that had some really beautiful effects etc; it ended up morphing into something else on a different platform, but ever since then, I've cringed at nearly all the PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen.
You make a good point: an often-missed reality with any humanitarian project is making it holistic - covering all the bases. Throwing money at a problem fixes nothing, and usually makes things worse, unless you do it in a way that fits with the culture, has required infrastructure, training, follow-up, etc.
So here, the tools are great... as long as there's someone who knows how to use them, and the necessary resources available to support them, and the software for them to use, and the power and internet infrastructure, and making it available in their language, and educating them how to use them, and someone to fix them (maybe - they are tablets, after all), etc, etc.
But, I know first-hand that teaching yourself can be more effective than a standard classroom scenario (I was homeschooled), so it may well let the students bypass the useless teachers.
+99.999%: You may want to work on your maths. :-)
Actually, no. A lot of customers I had to work with would use their ISP-assigned email address and whatever mail client shipped with the machine (or was most readily available - Windows Live Mail, for example... bleck). It would be nice if these people used webmail, because then they'd not suffer quite so bad from catastrophic HDD failure. (Joe Average user not backing up is a good argument for the cloud, incidentally).
Also, if you get at all rural (I live in New Zealand and worked at a shop that served rural customers), webmail is not an option if you're on dial-up, trust me.