There's no need for that anymore. Today's command protocols are pretty much bulletproof, and you can also send up a whole bunch of commands ahead of time as command macros.
Re:why not say hello? - seems pretty obvious...
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
It has been argued - reasonably, I think - that any civlization we communicate with is likely to be considerably more advanced than us. Why? because we've only been at the business of using the EM spectrum for communication for a very short time - we're noobs. The little green men have probably been at it much longer, and are therefore more advanced, if one assumes that technological advance correlates with time.
I feel the same frustration, but regard it as an interesting scientific engineering challenge for which we have no solution yet. The question that fascinates me most, is how we would detect and communicate with a very highly advanced civilization, or with a species in which everyone is massively smart.
Re:How could you not make jokes?
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
You're in the planet business, which has a sample size of under a dozen. And most of those remain mysteries. It would be foolish to believe we know anything.
Non-sequitur. More correctly, one could not claim that we know everything, but no one is, so that's is a moot point
This has been done for some missions, but you can't just slap on something you've got in the storage room and then bet $400 million on it.
The MER rovers have been done, they are what they are, the burden is on you to show they could have been done cheaper. It's always more complicated than you imagine.
I beleive that for a nice round number, people usually take 1000 meters per second as a bullet speed. And yes, they know that not all bullets travel at the same speed.
If we got the 40 GB iPod, we could put about half of our CDs (about 20 of which are "pop music") on it. It won't be excessive until it's about 100 GB, and then we'll just have to get more CDs.
I like this idea, but it would have to be a bit more than $1 to make much of a difference. Me, I'd put in 2 orders of magnitue more if I thought it would go straight into high ROI projects.
I don't think many scientists work in Imperial units any more, and most engineers don't either. Where I work, it's a mix, and depends on the discipline, but the vast majority work in MKS or cgs.
People tend to think of advanced technology in space, but space engineering is actually very conservative, and flight heritage is golden. The problem we get into is some 60s/70s heritage technology, which is still very important in space (esp. in the propulsion area), and those folks use pounds mass (double ugh), pounds force, inches and feet. I think the problem ultimately extends to heritage precision tooling and hardware, which has to be either inches or centimeters, and can't be both.
I think we'll have almost everything metric in about 10 years.
No one knows how societies and individuals will react to such news. however, I would predict that there will some people in some cultures who will find that this contradicts their dogma. Need a new dogma? No - the usual mix of denial and hate. These however, are not the reactions that worry me most. There's the other end of the anti-humanist spectrum.
Brights would almost universally find the news exciting and cool. Many (I hope most) religious people will too.
I too, would lke to hear a good definition of life that would be cross-chemistry.
Yes, it is. I would say we're not mystified, just a little bemused. And stop calling it football! Football is played by big men in armor, not little men in shorts.
I don't understand your post at all. There is no "whole premise" as you describe it. Science has found no reason why sentient life on Earth should be unique. Rare, maybe (maybe not), but not unique. So, the hugely interesting and important question arises of just how rare it is. SETI is one of the best sets of investigations we can undertake now to try to answer that question. Astrobiology is the other area where we hope to make progress, and which could help us constrain some of the terms in the Drake Equation.
If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful.
Non-sequitur of the week, maybe month. communications != travel. Also, we've been using RF communications for about 100 years, so there's every reason to believe that only listeners in a small volume of space could know about us by those means. Also, if "they" were monitoring us from a safe distance, how would we know?
That was Isaac Asimov's idea, and very likely will happen one day. I don't have a problem with that. It's possible to see robots as our extended phenotype. I think they're very likely to be better at sentience than we are.
Evolutionary theory does not predict that individuals will never act so as to limit or even preclude their own reproductive success.
In fact, that is going on all around us with dropping fertility rates in humans all over the world. Does that mean that humans are immune to natural selection? Not at all. As long as we are mortal (yep, still are), then those individuals who have the most surviving children will have the most descendants in the future human population and their genes will propagate. It's just not clear how important that is anymore.
By building such capacious and versatile (and risky) brains for us, our genomes have effectively relinquished control of their own destiny. Why they did this is a very interesting question, and one I don;t believe we have an answer for yet.
What I want to know is can you take C++ code you've developed under SPARC Solaris and port it to x86 Solaris with a reasonable chance of compiling first try?
But aren't bonobos chimps? Also, I believe that it's not really established yet ust how close chimps are to humans. Estimates range from 94% to 99%. This should settle it once the comparisons are done.
We already know that we're closely related to chimps in the gross sense - now we can get a much more precise idea of where, when and how we diverged. Pretty exciting stuff, but they should keep digging for bones - there's nothing like ground truth.
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There's no need for that anymore. Today's command protocols are pretty much bulletproof, and you can also send up a whole bunch of commands ahead of time as command macros .
That can't be right.
It has been argued - reasonably, I think - that any civlization we communicate with is likely to be considerably more advanced than us. Why? because we've only been at the business of using the EM spectrum for communication for a very short time - we're noobs. The little green men have probably been at it much longer, and are therefore more advanced, if one assumes that technological advance correlates with time.
I feel the same frustration, but regard it as an interesting scientific engineering challenge for which we have no solution yet. The question that fascinates me most, is how we would detect and communicate with a very highly advanced civilization, or with a species in which everyone is massively smart.
Non-sequitur. More correctly, one could not claim that we know everything, but no one is, so that's is a moot point
.This has been done for some missions, but you can't just slap on something you've got in the storage room and then bet $400 million on it.
The MER rovers have been done, they are what they are, the burden is on you to show they could have been done cheaper. It's always more complicated than you imagine.
About right - that works out to about 5800 meters per second, which I would say is about 6 times faster than a speeding bullet.
I beleive that for a nice round number, people usually take 1000 meters per second as a bullet speed. And yes, they know that not all bullets travel at the same speed.
More to the point, why didn't the /. editors catch this?
If we got the 40 GB iPod, we could put about half of our CDs (about 20 of which are "pop music") on it. It won't be excessive until it's about 100 GB, and then we'll just have to get more CDs.
I like this idea, but it would have to be a bit more than $1 to make much of a difference. Me, I'd put in 2 orders of magnitue more if I thought it would go straight into high ROI projects.
I don't think many scientists work in Imperial units any more, and most engineers don't either. Where I work, it's a mix, and depends on the discipline, but the vast majority work in MKS or cgs.
People tend to think of advanced technology in space, but space engineering is actually very conservative, and flight heritage is golden. The problem we get into is some 60s/70s heritage technology, which is still very important in space (esp. in the propulsion area), and those folks use pounds mass (double ugh), pounds force, inches and feet. I think the problem ultimately extends to heritage precision tooling and hardware, which has to be either inches or centimeters, and can't be both.
I think we'll have almost everything metric in about 10 years.
oops - no one should read that to impy that Brights are anti-humanist. Not at all.
Maybe I hallucinate.
No one knows how societies and individuals will react to such news. however, I would predict that there will some people in some cultures who will find that this contradicts their dogma. Need a new dogma? No - the usual mix of denial and hate. These however, are not the reactions that worry me most. There's the other end of the anti-humanist spectrum.
Brights would almost universally find the news exciting and cool. Many (I hope most) religious people will too.
I too, would lke to hear a good definition of life that would be cross-chemistry.
Yes, it is. I would say we're not mystified, just a little bemused. And stop calling it football! Football is played by big men in armor, not little men in shorts.
Not that again! -5:utter, tired lameness. RTFFRB.
It's probably too much to hope that we'll learn as much from the voyage of Beagle 2 as from that of Beagle 1, but that is my hope that goes with it.
More realistically,just some good data that further constrains any theories about Martian life.
I don't understand your post at all. There is no "whole premise" as you describe it. Science has found no reason why sentient life on Earth should be unique. Rare, maybe (maybe not), but not unique. So, the hugely interesting and important question arises of just how rare it is. SETI is one of the best sets of investigations we can undertake now to try to answer that question. Astrobiology is the other area where we hope to make progress, and which could help us constrain some of the terms in the Drake Equation.
Non-sequitur of the week, maybe month. communications != travel. Also, we've been using RF communications for about 100 years, so there's every reason to believe that only listeners in a small volume of space could know about us by those means. Also, if "they" were monitoring us from a safe distance, how would we know?
That was Isaac Asimov's idea, and very likely will happen one day. I don't have a problem with that. It's possible to see robots as our extended phenotype. I think they're very likely to be better at sentience than we are.
First order comparisons between the genomes are already being done. See this
Coolness.
Sunblock wouldn't help much against high energy protons, electrons and alpha particles. UV light isn't deflected by magnetic field.
OTOH, I don;t think anyone expects the mag field to disappear - just move.
Evolutionary theory does not predict that individuals will never act so as to limit or even preclude their own reproductive success.
In fact, that is going on all around us with dropping fertility rates in humans all over the world. Does that mean that humans are immune to natural selection? Not at all. As long as we are mortal (yep, still are), then those individuals who have the most surviving children will have the most descendants in the future human population and their genes will propagate. It's just not clear how important that is anymore.
By building such capacious and versatile (and risky) brains for us, our genomes have effectively relinquished control of their own destiny. Why they did this is a very interesting question, and one I don;t believe we have an answer for yet.
What I want to know is can you take C++ code you've developed under SPARC Solaris and port it to x86 Solaris with a reasonable chance of compiling first try?
But aren't bonobos chimps? Also, I believe that it's not really established yet ust how close chimps are to humans. Estimates range from 94% to 99%. This should settle it once the comparisons are done.
Neither are chimps.
We already know that we're closely related to chimps in the gross sense - now we can get a much more precise idea of where, when and how we diverged. Pretty exciting stuff, but they should keep digging for bones - there's nothing like ground truth.