Actually, the Most Recent Common Ancestor was probably a human about 3500 years ago, but... That whole "watchmaker" nonsense has been put paid. Take the argument apart, and it fails.
Peacock tails are the result of sexual selection. The big tails may well impede survival, but that's a tradeoff against making more little peacocks in the time you have.
It's not really about survival - that's just a means to the end of passing on your genes. You also have to mate and reporduce, and somehow (there is a staggering diversity of strategies) provide your offspring with what they'll need to do the same.
I refer you to the excellent Evolution 101 podcast, transcripts of which can be found here. Select the transcripts that focus on molecular evidence. The molecular evidence is overwhelming that we have a common ancestor with chimps, and creatonist theory (if you can call it that) is falsified.
This isn't to say that nothing is unique about humans. Clearly we were somehow positioned to undergo rapid selection for certain traits that the chimp ancestor population didn't need. Reconstructing how that happened is reasearch program that will take generations, but gaps in knowledge about past events doesn't discredit the knowledge we do have, however much you may wish it otherwise.
That all life on Earth in its amazing diversity has a common ancestry in the inconceivable distant past is to me a much more awe inspiring thought than any myth of special creation. Scientists and other thoughtful people don't just reject creationism because it's demonstrably wrong - they also reject it because it's ugly.
Apple doesn't like to go deeply into debt, so it would have to be a stock swap. Adobe has good earnings, so it might be doable. With the right deal, the Apple share price would stay about the same.
I would say that sciecne defintiely has a bias against "God of the Gaps," Christian or no. I suppose it's possible to design your deity out of the gaps, which science keeps closing, but that's theology, not religion.
I'm not in that filed, but it strikes me as massively incorrect to assert that they are "just" looking for human missing links. In fact, I know that paleontologists love documenting transitional species of all sorts, and have done so time and time again. It should be no mystery as to why documenting what we know about human ancestry is of special interest and gets more press coverage.
I work in the Space field, and think astronomy and planetary science are way cool and such, but I don't know of any more important field of pure scientific study than the quest to understand human ancestry. Digging up the fossilized bones of great-great-great.....great grandma is just one line of inquiry.
Good point. However, is it not possible that a rare close encounters do occur in a resonance orbit, and that the near-collision enounter would be the first such?
That's probably a more resonable strategy - use the asteroid's own reaction mass and a simple magnetic gun to expel it. There are a number of non-trivial technical problems with this, but I don't see any showstoppers.
Almost anything could work if you tried hard enough, but it would be nice to use technology that would be useful for mining asteroids in the first place, so we'd get something else back for the billions it would cost.
The only thing I'm pretty sure wouldn't work well would be nuking the asteroid. The physics just aren't with you on that one. However, a Daedalus type nuke propulsion device could work.
It's not linear like that. You need to assure that you don't just set up another collision at a later time. The problem isn't straightforward, but if the asteroid is in some sort of resonance, you may need to disrupt that, which could take substantially more than 1 m/sec.
I don't mind assumptions being challenged, but if we show you're several orders of magnitude from the state of the art, then we're not all that sensitive to assumptions.
We're nowhere near being able to do that reliably. Ion thrusters aren't big. Let's say it's a small asteroid with a mass of only 10 million metric tons, or 10^10 kg. Then going with the most optimistic numebrs tossed around for an ion engine (ejection velocities of 200,000 mps), then you need about 10^10/(2e5) or 5e4 kg of ion propellant just to budge it one meter per second. That's a couple of orders of magnitude more than we can do now, and we're talking about a small nudge to a small asteroid. A more typical asteroid would be 10^13 - 10^15 kg in mass by my back of the envelope calcs (about 10^2 km^3 with one metric ton per cubic meter, or the density of water.)
The amount of nudge you need to move it's probablity ellipsoid off the Earth depends on how much time you have, and you'd probably be constrained to thrusting about its spin axis, but I would say it's on the order of 1 meter per second or greater. SO, if the potential impact is 100 years away, the first thing you do is track it really well for a few years to get the ellipsoid smaller. If the Earth still passes through it, then you can develop something to give it a nudge.
It IS a false analogy, but for sexually reproducing organisms, it's not so much mutation as crossover that is important in the grand schem of things. My kids wouldn't be clones of me (lucky them!) even if there were no errors in transcription to the little swimmers who ultimately Did the Job.
Yes, it's just punctuated equilibrium, and it's been discussed quite a lot for many years and really doesn't contradict Darwinism at all. No one is suggesting that evolution happens via "saltation" - when genomes makea radical shifts in one generation. Large random changes in a genome are just about guaranteed to be nonviable. The only thing that is even apparently controversial (it really isn't) is whether the rate of change is hihgly variable or not.
Dawrwinism proposes that such powerful evolutionary forces as predator/prey arms races and sexual selection will be episodic - they move along quickly until something close to a state of stability is reached - the rabbit is a little faster than the fox, but not so miuch that the fox can't survive.
Re:The e-mail I sent to the editor was ignored.
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
Not only do I already have a life, it would seem I have someone's goat as well. And I ain't giving it back.
Re:The e-mail I sent to the editor was ignored.
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I didn't see the foot icon. Only problem is - it's not funny, just sad.
The e-mail I sent to the editor was ignored.
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
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· Score: 5, Informative
This guy is a pseudo-scientific moonbat. Please don't waste your time with the not-so-FA.
I took a quick look at this article. Of course, we've all heard about satellites launched by glorified artillery pieces - Jules Verne originated the concept. It is also clearly useless for nearly any payload of interest. I'm not surprised no one is pursuing it. What kind of second stage would your propose that would endure those environments? And even 15,000 feet is tough to do, but that is very unlikely to be an adequately high altitude, as the scale height at sea level is roughly 7,000 meters.
How does a rail gun work for launch from Earth? Have you done any serious analysis, because I don't see it. It's isn't just a matter of getting up some speed. Thos speeds (around 7 km/sec) are impractical on the ground, and you need a second boost at high altitude to get into Earth orbit, which the rail gun can't give you.
With carbon nanotube technology maturing, there is some hope for space elevators, although the engineering issues are non-trivial.
And PALM stock if off a little this morning
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You're probably right. The current market cap of PALM is just under $2G, si figure Apple would pay around $3G to buy it up, for a company expected to make about $100M in profit over the next year. That's easily affordable for AAPL, but a 3% annual ROI isn't worth the trouble unless they have some IP AAPL, really, really wants. The Treo? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Proof is for mathematicians. Science deals with evidence and uses coherency as epistemic justification. that eveidence is always about things that have happened in the past, whether it was a few seocnds, a few years, or a few billion years. current science inherently involves controversy.
The Big Bang happened about 10^10 years ago and refinement continues, but the measurements keep getting better. If much more than that, the current expansion of the universe doesn't make sense, and much less and it collides with our understanding of stellar and galactic evolution.
As for relativity, its effects are directly observed all the time in particle accelerators. There is lots of other evidence for it was well - everything from high Z gamma ray bursts to the Poynting-Robertson effect to gravitational lensing to the bending of starlight observed during solar eclises - besides the fact that it simply makes sense that there is no absolute frame of reference and the laws of nature should be the same in all frames.
Of course, quantum effects are observed all the time in the lab and QM is required to explain why the spectra of stars have discrete lines in them, or to explain how lasers work, and so on ad infinitum. String theory is having difficulty finding empirical justification, but some of its proponents argue that this is only a few decades away.
There are few things more practical or powrful than a good theory, and we have several good theories. These are not dogmas, not statements of faith, not eternally unassailable, and not theorems that can be proven from postulates.
NASA is studying commercial alternatives. A number of hungry alt.space companies will be in the hunt, like Space-X (first Falcon launch is planned for this Friday). In my view, this is a subtle end-run around the hugely expensive ESA.
The problem with this is that the rover would need it's own propulsion stage with a very high delta-V. This is costly and requires lost of extra mass. We are talking ~10^4 meters per second. Play with the rocket equation and reasonable ejection velocities, and you'll see what I mean. For a reasonable Isp of 300 seconds and no stage mass, you get a payload mass fraction of 3% for 10 km/sec delta-V. What that adds up to is it would have to be a really tiny rover, which has inherent problems. Maybe with a gravity assist or two, a really cooperative comet, and more exotic propulsion you get it up to 30 kg, which might be enough, but it is a tough problem.
The Rosetta mission is doing a comet rendezvous, but they needed an Ariane 5 to get there, and will have no impactor.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Most Recent Common Ancestor was probably a human about 3500 years ago, but... That whole "watchmaker" nonsense has been put paid. Take the argument apart, and it fails.
Are you saying speciation has never happened?
Are you seriously proposing that speciation has never happened? Think about it.
Peacock tails are the result of sexual selection. The big tails may well impede survival, but that's a tradeoff against making more little peacocks in the time you have.
It's not really about survival - that's just a means to the end of passing on your genes. You also have to mate and reporduce, and somehow (there is a staggering diversity of strategies) provide your offspring with what they'll need to do the same.
I refer you to the excellent Evolution 101 podcast, transcripts of which can be found here. Select the transcripts that focus on molecular evidence. The molecular evidence is overwhelming that we have a common ancestor with chimps, and creatonist theory (if you can call it that) is falsified.
This isn't to say that nothing is unique about humans. Clearly we were somehow positioned to undergo rapid selection for certain traits that the chimp ancestor population didn't need. Reconstructing how that happened is reasearch program that will take generations, but gaps in knowledge about past events doesn't discredit the knowledge we do have, however much you may wish it otherwise.
That all life on Earth in its amazing diversity has a common ancestry in the inconceivable distant past is to me a much more awe inspiring thought than any myth of special creation. Scientists and other thoughtful people don't just reject creationism because it's demonstrably wrong - they also reject it because it's ugly.
Apple doesn't like to go deeply into debt, so it would have to be a stock swap. Adobe has good earnings, so it might be doable. With the right deal, the Apple share price would stay about the same.
I would say that sciecne defintiely has a bias against "God of the Gaps," Christian or no. I suppose it's possible to design your deity out of the gaps, which science keeps closing, but that's theology, not religion.
I'm not in that filed, but it strikes me as massively incorrect to assert that they are "just" looking for human missing links. In fact, I know that paleontologists love documenting transitional species of all sorts, and have done so time and time again. It should be no mystery as to why documenting what we know about human ancestry is of special interest and gets more press coverage.
I work in the Space field, and think astronomy and planetary science are way cool and such, but I don't know of any more important field of pure scientific study than the quest to understand human ancestry. Digging up the fossilized bones of great-great-great.....great grandma is just one line of inquiry.
Good point. However, is it not possible that a rare close encounters do occur in a resonance orbit, and that the near-collision enounter would be the first such?
That's probably a more resonable strategy - use the asteroid's own reaction mass and a simple magnetic gun to expel it. There are a number of non-trivial technical problems with this, but I don't see any showstoppers.
Almost anything could work if you tried hard enough, but it would be nice to use technology that would be useful for mining asteroids in the first place, so we'd get something else back for the billions it would cost.
The only thing I'm pretty sure wouldn't work well would be nuking the asteroid. The physics just aren't with you on that one. However, a Daedalus type nuke propulsion device could work.
It's not linear like that. You need to assure that you don't just set up another collision at a later time. The problem isn't straightforward, but if the asteroid is in some sort of resonance, you may need to disrupt that, which could take substantially more than 1 m/sec.
I don't mind assumptions being challenged, but if we show you're several orders of magnitude from the state of the art, then we're not all that sensitive to assumptions.
We're nowhere near being able to do that reliably. Ion thrusters aren't big. Let's say it's a small asteroid with a mass of only 10 million metric tons, or 10^10 kg. Then going with the most optimistic numebrs tossed around for an ion engine (ejection velocities of 200,000 mps), then you need about 10^10/(2e5) or 5e4 kg of ion propellant just to budge it one meter per second. That's a couple of orders of magnitude more than we can do now, and we're talking about a small nudge to a small asteroid. A more typical asteroid would be 10^13 - 10^15 kg in mass by my back of the envelope calcs (about 10^2 km^3 with one metric ton per cubic meter, or the density of water.)
The amount of nudge you need to move it's probablity ellipsoid off the Earth depends on how much time you have, and you'd probably be constrained to thrusting about its spin axis, but I would say it's on the order of 1 meter per second or greater. SO, if the potential impact is 100 years away, the first thing you do is track it really well for a few years to get the ellipsoid smaller. If the Earth still passes through it, then you can develop something to give it a nudge.
It IS a false analogy, but for sexually reproducing organisms, it's not so much mutation as crossover that is important in the grand schem of things. My kids wouldn't be clones of me (lucky them!) even if there were no errors in transcription to the little swimmers who ultimately Did the Job.
Yes, it's just punctuated equilibrium, and it's been discussed quite a lot for many years and really doesn't contradict Darwinism at all. No one is suggesting that evolution happens via "saltation" - when genomes makea radical shifts in one generation. Large random changes in a genome are just about guaranteed to be nonviable. The only thing that is even apparently controversial (it really isn't) is whether the rate of change is hihgly variable or not.
Dawrwinism proposes that such powerful evolutionary forces as predator/prey arms races and sexual selection will be episodic - they move along quickly until something close to a state of stability is reached - the rabbit is a little faster than the fox, but not so miuch that the fox can't survive.
Not only do I already have a life, it would seem I have someone's goat as well. And I ain't giving it back.
Yeah, I didn't see the foot icon. Only problem is - it's not funny, just sad.
This guy is a pseudo-scientific moonbat. Please don't waste your time with the not-so-FA.
I took a quick look at this article. Of course, we've all heard about satellites launched by glorified artillery pieces - Jules Verne originated the concept. It is also clearly useless for nearly any payload of interest. I'm not surprised no one is pursuing it. What kind of second stage would your propose that would endure those environments? And even 15,000 feet is tough to do, but that is very unlikely to be an adequately high altitude, as the scale height at sea level is roughly 7,000 meters.
Wasn't that why they did the deal with Motorola?
How does a rail gun work for launch from Earth? Have you done any serious analysis, because I don't see it. It's isn't just a matter of getting up some speed. Thos speeds (around 7 km/sec) are impractical on the ground, and you need a second boost at high altitude to get into Earth orbit, which the rail gun can't give you.
With carbon nanotube technology maturing, there is some hope for space elevators, although the engineering issues are non-trivial.
So, the market doesn't believe the rumor either
You're probably right. The current market cap of PALM is just under $2G, si figure Apple would pay around $3G to buy it up, for a company expected to make about $100M in profit over the next year. That's easily affordable for AAPL, but a 3% annual ROI isn't worth the trouble unless they have some IP AAPL, really, really wants. The Treo? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Proof is for mathematicians. Science deals with evidence and uses coherency as epistemic justification. that eveidence is always about things that have happened in the past, whether it was a few seocnds, a few years, or a few billion years. current science inherently involves controversy.
The Big Bang happened about 10^10 years ago and refinement continues, but the measurements keep getting better. If much more than that, the current expansion of the universe doesn't make sense, and much less and it collides with our understanding of stellar and galactic evolution.
As for relativity, its effects are directly observed all the time in particle accelerators. There is lots of other evidence for it was well - everything from high Z gamma ray bursts to the Poynting-Robertson effect to gravitational lensing to the bending of starlight observed during solar eclises - besides the fact that it simply makes sense that there is no absolute frame of reference and the laws of nature should be the same in all frames.
Of course, quantum effects are observed all the time in the lab and QM is required to explain why the spectra of stars have discrete lines in them, or to explain how lasers work, and so on ad infinitum. String theory is having difficulty finding empirical justification, but some of its proponents argue that this is only a few decades away.
There are few things more practical or powrful than a good theory, and we have several good theories. These are not dogmas, not statements of faith, not eternally unassailable, and not theorems that can be proven from postulates.
Ok, the troll should be stuffed now.
NASA is studying commercial alternatives. A number of hungry alt.space companies will be in the hunt, like Space-X (first Falcon launch is planned for this Friday). In my view, this is a subtle end-run around the hugely expensive ESA.
Yes, but this resignation, is very, very good news indeed. The outrage in the scientific community is not something NASA could long tolerate.
The problem with this is that the rover would need it's own propulsion stage with a very high delta-V. This is costly and requires lost of extra mass. We are talking ~10^4 meters per second. Play with the rocket equation and reasonable ejection velocities, and you'll see what I mean. For a reasonable Isp of 300 seconds and no stage mass, you get a payload mass fraction of 3% for 10 km/sec delta-V. What that adds up to is it would have to be a really tiny rover, which has inherent problems. Maybe with a gravity assist or two, a really cooperative comet, and more exotic propulsion you get it up to 30 kg, which might be enough, but it is a tough problem.
The Rosetta mission is doing a comet rendezvous, but they needed an Ariane 5 to get there, and will have no impactor.