DID YOU EVEN READ THE POST PRIOR TO YOURS?. Or did you just blindly post?! Sheesh.
I hit reply to the story as soon as I saw it. As you know there's a significant delay between the time someone submits a comment and when it makes it to the static page, so no, I didn't read the previous comment.
Disclaimer: I'm just about done with my bachelors in Physics.
In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.
One of my physics professors here at Cornell does a lot of heavy spintronics research, and I can tell you that they are not even *CONSIDERING* using single electron spins to store classical information right now. Forget all the crazy quantum effects, and the fact that all the electrons nearby would interfere horrendously thorugh spin-spin interactions, thermal energy would screw that up in a jiffy. Think what happens to a magnet when it's heated up to the curie temperature (electrons are just tiny magnets). We don't even have a way to accurately measure the spin of one exact electron yet.
As I understand it, the idea is actually pretty simple: instead of propagating electrical signals in a stream of electrons by altering their momentums (through the use of an EM field), you propagate a change in spin along the stream. Instead of speeding up or slowing down electrons, you're only flipping them up and down (you're actually flipping entire regions at that). Because of hte spin-spin coupling I mentioned before, this change in spin will propagate through the group of electrons *VERY* rapidly, much closer to the speed of light than a change in momentum would (by changing voltage, etc). So what we have is *MUCH* higher switching speeds with hardly any energy loss! So basically you have ultra-high speed chips that dissapate very little energy. Forget that watercooler in your laptop, you might not even need more than a tiny battery once spintronics becomes popular.
Now, as with any technology spintronics has its set of challenges. The biggest one that I am aware of is the ability to inject spin properly when electrons are moving between different materials. Many crystaline structures can alter the spin state significantly on entry, thus destroying the signal (or at least reducing it). I am confident, however, that many of these problems can be solved, especially given that spintronics is provably much better than electronics for computing tasks. Just look at the enormous number of problems the semiconductor industry has already solved in the last 40 years. Add to that the hope that all of this could work at room temperature, and well, it's very exciting to say the least.
So once again, we're not talking about individual electron spin. The only computing paradigms I'm aware of that use spin of individual particles are Quantum Computers (which do not behave the same algorithmically as classical computers) which are an entirely different story.
It's why they don't call them laptops anymore. Look on any major computer manufacturer webpage, you'd be hardpressed to find the word "laptop"
Dell - Notebook
HPAQ - Notebook
Alienware - mobile gaming
VoodooPC- mobile
Not to be obnoxious, but I was curious about your claims and performed a search on google of each site to measure the number of pages containing the word "laptop".
Dell - 20,800
HPAQ - 6320
Alienware - 39 ("notebook" only had 25)
VoodooPC - 142 ("notebook" only had 62)
Granted the number of "notebook" terms on Dell and HPAQ was significantly higher than the term "laptop", but it's not like the term was suddenly erased by marketing or something...
My Powerbook G4 17" works just fine on my lap, as did my old iBook.
Is absolute zero really an unreachable limit because of uncertainty? Or is it like the example in a previous Slashdot article where Apollo never passes the tortoise, because he must first close half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half that distance, etc... and never actually passes the turtle.
Firstly, I believe that's Zeno, not Apollo. Secondly, no, it's nothing like that. Look at the formula:
Um*Up >= Hbar
The uncertainty of the momentum (Mass*velocity) times the uncertainty of postion must be larger than Hbar (planks constant divided by 2 pi). So if Um = 0 (as is the case at absolute 0), what times 0 is larger than or equal to HBar? Clearly no finite number!
Now obviously theories cannot "prove" a negative. That is, I could try an experiment 100000000 times to show that a tennis ball cannot phase through a planet, however that only says it's very unlikely that it would happen, not that it's truely impossible. I was careful to say that according to quantum theory absolute zero is unattainable, however it could very well be wrong. It's been well tested though, and I for one have much confidence in it.
Not sure but was wondering wouldn't this be a kind of exception to Heizenberg since absolute zero is the state of no movement then it would seem you would lose the uncertainty in location because that wasn't changing.
Actually as much as you might think this... it's not! In fact, even situations where you surely would think the uncertainty principle doesn't apply, it turns out it does!
In an "empty space", you would think energy was zero. However, the uncertainty principle applies to all conjugate quantum variables (position/momentum, energy/time, etc)... So in any amount of space, if you measure the energy in it over a certain amount of time, you always have some uncertainty. Thus "empty space" must be seething with a roughly uniform amount of random energy.
The Casimir Effect is a manifestation of this which as been experimentally verified. Weird, eh?
As another poster mentioned, the Bose Einstein condensates form precisely due to this Heizenburg "expansion" due to cooling, and so Absolute Zero really isn't reachable. Sorry.
The chances are that they'll never hit absolute zero
You're more right than you know. According to current quantum mechanics (which has been tested inside and out), the Heizenberg uncertainty principle states that the more you know about the velocity of a partical, the less you can know about its position, etc. In other words, the uncertainties must multiply together to be greater than plank's constant divided by 2PI. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the uncertainty in momentum (which is a functional of thermal energy at that point, which is proportional to temperature) decreases. This causes the uncertainty in posiition to drastically increase.
Anyways at absolute zero this would mean the uncertainty in position would become infinite, in other words the position of the particle would be completely undefined. This is not possible so thus Absolute Zero is unattainable, even in theory.
Disclaimer: I'm still working on my degree, and I was in a hurry writing this. Please correct me if you can:)
I work directly for Steve Squyres at Cornell, and I've also worked with Jim Bell before (although not so much any more).
Squyres is quite a guy... I really love his management style... he keeps his nose out of things unless there's a big problem, then he dives right in:-D
I wanna take one of his classes sometime but... doesn't look likely, as I'm so darn busy with everything else.
Cheers,
Justin
P.S. Squyres is the Principle Investigator of the mission, which means he's in charge of the science end of everything and making sure we get science back from the mission. I'm glad it's him and not me:)
Oh , I don't know about the maintenance - if you don't maintain a superconducting fuse widget (eg keep it cold.... er what else is there?) , I suspect that it'd stop working pretty quickly.
This is opposed to 'normal' protection devices that fail to actuate when broken, a superconducting thingo would actuate when broken.
Wow, that's actually a very good point. I think though that your conclusion is exactly opposite of what it should be, however... Think of it this way:
It is my experience that in large beaurocratic systems, things don't get fixed/done unless there's a problem. Poorly maintained breakers, etc, don't usually cause problems (they only cause problems in an emergency, by which time it's too late!) so they don't get much attention. There's plenty of attention on things when a distaster strikes (like a power outage)... You can bet people would get fired if these new superconducting "widgets" (as you called them) stop functioning during normal operations often. This means they will be properly maintained and thus more likely to work when tehre IS an emergency. Same reason that backup generators that are used often are maintained better than those that are rarely used.
So it'd seem to me that while you point out an exccelent difference, it actually works oppositely of how you think. A very cool inisight nevertheless.
(Notice my use of the technical terms 'widget' and 'thingo', and bow down to my enormous knowledge on the subject;-)
At least you're not afraid to jokingly admit you're not an expert... Hell, I have 3 years of Physics at Cornell University and work for NASA doing software engineering, but that doesn't make me an expert about power grid stuff... Although I do understand most of the physics:-D
Anyone who knows anything beyond EE 101 knows that trying to stop electicity over 30,000 volts is heading for trouble. Unless you have a huge insultor that is at least 500,000 Ohms, the electricty will just jump over it without even slowing down.
And anyone who knows any physics knows that that statement is bullshit without some sort of geometrical context.
Look at all the 350k powerlines out there... You don't see them arcing every day, because it's not voltage the makes the problem, it's electric field strength! These pipes are probably rather long, so the E-field strength that they will be experiencing should be quite small (E-field = potential / distance). The superconductors lose superconductivity during a surge, becoming a resister whose resistance is proportional to temperature. Due to I*R^2 ohmic heating, the resistance will shoot up rather quickly, thus cutting off the surge. Much of the surge's power will be turned into waste heat (I'd hate to have to design that cooling system) but it's much better than the alternative.
It should also be clarified that arcing occurs precisely because circuit breakers, being mechanical, are not large enough to keep the E-field to a level that won't ionize the surrounding atmosphere (allowing arcing).
Disclaimer: I'm a year away from my bachelors in Applied Physics.
Making the protection systems fancier isn't going to help too much if they don't install/maintain them properly.
This is not a simple matter of making the protection systems fancier... this is a fundamentally different approach to preventing cascade failure. It's orders of magnitude more robust (no arcing current, etc, as mentioned in the article) and there is no good reason why we shouldnt' have more robust systems.
These sort of things won't all be maintained properly, however it is my hope that after this blackout the maintainence system is revised to minimize negligence. Having these systems installed will help the well-maintained stations not suffer due to the problems of the ill-maintained... It makes the whole system much fairer and could possibly save a lot of money in the long run.
I also think that advancing superconducting technology is worth this effort alone, as it is a very promising field. A superconducting electric motor for an electric car would only have to be the size of a softball (extremely high magnetic field densities, and of course efficencies). Superconductors are being used in better bandpass filters for things like cellular telephone transceiver towers and possibly even space missions. Superconductors are also used for experiments with NMR quantum computing, and may hold the key to confined fusion (yes, a long way off I know).
You are correct that there is an issue to be addressed with maintainence, however I cannot see how this could do anything but help the situation.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA, however I write software.
They should try to park the next one as far away from Hubble as possible. There might be some interesting things we could see with such a huge effective aperture.
Hmm... Not sure what exactly you mean by this. If you're talking simple parallax-based astrometry, the hubble c an already do this effectively by taking measurements of the same stars at different points in the Earth's revolution around Sol. This gives it an effective baseline of 2 A.U. No tandem satallite in earth orbit can possibly match that.
Perhaps you're talking about aperture synthesis interferometry? This is what is used by things like the Very Large Array... it involves single combination to extract additional imaging information from the phase differences. While that is very cool, at optical wavelengths (like those that Hubble uses) it would require Formation Flying to well within a wavelength of visible light (certainly impossible with any technology we have today, let alone already on the Hubble). The Terrestrial Planet Finder mission is possibly using a formation flying architecture to do infrared nulling interferometry (a different type of interferometry that allows them to filter out light from a star to see nearby planets). At optical wavelengths, it'd be nearly impossible.
Also don't forget that the larger your synthetic aperture, the more photons you need to collect to have a successful integration... This means that for very large baselines, (like the ones you suggest) you'd need *HUGE* telescopes looking for months on end.
don't know if they are already doing so, but it seems a natural match to use something like this in conjunction with a pulsejet.
Although the link you've provided is very interesting, I highly doubt that the two technologies are remotely compatable. The PDE is based on supersonic explosions that create shockwaves, whereas the TASHE uses sonic propagation of energy to achieve the desired result. The difference between the two methods is rather profound... almost all of the equations change when you allow shocks (suddenly everything's highly nonlinear, and you have infinite gradients, etc).
TASHE is a very cool technology, but it has only a superficial resemblence to the PDE. Nice to see someone's doing something with the old Sterling engine concept though.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Disclaimer: I'm starting my fourth year of physics at Cornell University.
So if you wanted to have 10 times as much fresh water as we do now, that'd barely make a dent in the oceans, and I'm saying that in the future we wont' even NEED that much.
Run the numbers before you post something rediculous like desalination killing off species!
Quoth the article:
"You don't want to sail a ship over an erupting volcano," said Jennifer Reynolds, chief expedition scientist and a University of Alaska marine geologist.
Is this the same Jennifer Reynolds that works at the Freakin-Obvious department?
Water. We're running out as is, especially out in the midwest where it's all going to feed cows. The only way we could survive this long would be to be a planet of vegetarians. I'm all for it, but try convincing Texas that it can't eat meat anymore, even with impending doom down the road. Good luck.
Firstly... I don't know what planet you've been living on, but 3/4th of the earth's surface is covered in water. Desalination is not that difficult, and right now is mostly expensive due to the energies involved (clean cheap energy will change this). Combine this with the recycling technologies I mentioned (fully closed-system living/working units) and the ability to grow meat without the rest of the animal, and I think you have most of this covered.
A tremendous amount of the water we use is for things like toilet/shower/laundry and all of that will be easily recycled (locally even) in the future (technology exists now, just not practical). You need to factor this into your thinking.
I work at NASA as I said in my post and a lot of our technologies have plenty of uses on this spaceship we call earth.
Cheers,
Justin
"The future looks bright to those who know the way." - myself
That won't stop the AARP from trying it. Retirement age isn't being increased to keep up with life expectency yet, at what point are we going to start?
I'd assume that babyboomers retiring just might impact the system enough that it's re-examined.
A lot of things in life aren't dealt with until they actually cause problems. Doubly so for teh government. Make this an election issue, and I promise something will get done.
Besides don't a lot of the people on slashdot think the government is conspiring to control their lives more and more every day? If so... by the time retirement age is a problem, our dictator will have something done about it.
We get to read the same slashdot stories posted over and over. and over. ad infinutum (ad nauseum?) Perhaps this means the "Mysterious Future" won't be mysterious any longer?
CowboyNeal will be elected president, as people will realize he's the smallest of the jokes at the polls. (well, comedy wise at least!)
CommanderTaco will use a spell checker, at least once. Maybe.
Last but not least... I predict a minimum of 3/.ers will read the article before posting.
I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity? Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
Actually I think it's a valid psychological point. A lot of individuals rationalize their dangerous behaviors in that they are going to "die sometime" anyways. The more you have to lose, the less likely you are to take a risk.
I think the more interesting point, and one the article failed to mention, is where are all these people going to live, what are they going to eat, and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement? With the population of earth already increasing rapidly extending lifespans to three times their current level would have a huge impact.
Those are indeed interesting questions. First of all, the assumption that people would continue to retire in their sixties if their lifespan extended is rather silly. People used to have a life expectancy of 40 years, but we certainly don't stop working at 40 now. Provided the quality of life is high ehough for them to be useful, I know plenty of elderly individuals who'd love to be productive again. Medical technology should allow them to be much more fit, robust, etc by then anyways.
As for where everyone is going to live, have you ever been to Wyoming? There's literally *TONS* of space, we haven't even come close to saturating earth spatially, not to mention skyscrapers will continue to be larger/taller.
As for what they are going to eat... underground farming is a possibility, and it's quite possible with the help of organic synthasizing implants the food intake required by a human could be drastically reduced. Between that and organic recycling technology, there's no reason a household could not eventually be a closed loop system that only required energy input (recycling water/organics). It's what astronauts do already!
As for the growth rate... A lot of developed countries have populations that are barely growing, or are shrinking even. As technology becomes more and more inexpensive and pervasive, developing countries will be able to catch up. Between this and advanced technology (much of which is coming from the space program, of which I am a part) I think a lot of these problems are solvable.
The biggest issue (which you didn't mention) is where are we going to get the energy for all of these people? I mean, there's theoretical power sources that could handle it, but will they be around in time? Controlled fusion perhaps, or maybe giant solar collectors in space... I predict that between biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics and computer science, in a hundred years the only real commodities left will be energy and information (from which anything else can be derived).
Yes there's plenty of interesting problems we will face as we head into the later part of the 21st century, however I am confident there will be equally interesting solutions. 10+ billion people have a way of overcoming difficulties. That is, if we don't kill ourselves first.
Oh yea! And what's going to happen when we run out of IPs for them all!?
I'll sell mine on eBay for a ton of money, and stop wasting my time on slashdot;)
Slashdot Mirror
Have you considered using bongo drums for added redundancy?
And if that doesn't work, the customers can always join the Ukrainian Cellphone Destruction Championship.
Congular rolled over !
They also now provide service in central africa.
You know, cause of the new name.
Okay I'll just be going now.
DID YOU EVEN READ THE POST PRIOR TO YOURS?. Or did you just blindly post?! Sheesh.
I hit reply to the story as soon as I saw it. As you know there's a significant delay between the time someone submits a comment and when it makes it to the static page, so no, I didn't read the previous comment.
Do you understand now? Good!
Can you hear me now? Damn!
:)
So in laymen terms, it's like twisting one end of a cable instead of jarring it up and down to produce a wave?
:)
Wow, that's actually a pretty good way of thinking about it... I mean it's not exactly the same but... definately on the right track
yeah I'm sorry my post wasn't exactly oriented at the layman... I have a tendency to do that!
Cheers,
Justin
Disclaimer: I'm just about done with my bachelors in Physics.
In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.
One of my physics professors here at Cornell does a lot of heavy spintronics research, and I can tell you that they are not even *CONSIDERING* using single electron spins to store classical information right now. Forget all the crazy quantum effects, and the fact that all the electrons nearby would interfere horrendously thorugh spin-spin interactions, thermal energy would screw that up in a jiffy. Think what happens to a magnet when it's heated up to the curie temperature (electrons are just tiny magnets). We don't even have a way to accurately measure the spin of one exact electron yet.
As I understand it, the idea is actually pretty simple: instead of propagating electrical signals in a stream of electrons by altering their momentums (through the use of an EM field), you propagate a change in spin along the stream. Instead of speeding up or slowing down electrons, you're only flipping them up and down (you're actually flipping entire regions at that). Because of hte spin-spin coupling I mentioned before, this change in spin will propagate through the group of electrons *VERY* rapidly, much closer to the speed of light than a change in momentum would (by changing voltage, etc). So what we have is *MUCH* higher switching speeds with hardly any energy loss! So basically you have ultra-high speed chips that dissapate very little energy. Forget that watercooler in your laptop, you might not even need more than a tiny battery once spintronics becomes popular.
Now, as with any technology spintronics has its set of challenges. The biggest one that I am aware of is the ability to inject spin properly when electrons are moving between different materials. Many crystaline structures can alter the spin state significantly on entry, thus destroying the signal (or at least reducing it). I am confident, however, that many of these problems can be solved, especially given that spintronics is provably much better than electronics for computing tasks. Just look at the enormous number of problems the semiconductor industry has already solved in the last 40 years. Add to that the hope that all of this could work at room temperature, and well, it's very exciting to say the least.
So once again, we're not talking about individual electron spin. The only computing paradigms I'm aware of that use spin of individual particles are Quantum Computers (which do not behave the same algorithmically as classical computers) which are an entirely different story.
Cheers,
Justin
It's why they don't call them laptops anymore. Look on any major computer manufacturer webpage, you'd be hardpressed to find the word "laptop"
Dell - Notebook
HPAQ - Notebook
Alienware - mobile gaming
VoodooPC- mobile
Not to be obnoxious, but I was curious about your claims and performed a search on google of each site to measure the number of pages containing the word "laptop".
Dell - 20,800
HPAQ - 6320
Alienware - 39 ("notebook" only had 25)
VoodooPC - 142 ("notebook" only had 62)
Granted the number of "notebook" terms on Dell and HPAQ was significantly higher than the term "laptop", but it's not like the term was suddenly erased by marketing or something...
My Powerbook G4 17" works just fine on my lap, as did my old iBook.
Cheers,
Justin
Is absolute zero really an unreachable limit because of uncertainty? Or is it like the example in a previous Slashdot article where Apollo never passes the tortoise, because he must first close half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half that distance, etc... and never actually passes the turtle.
Firstly, I believe that's Zeno, not Apollo. Secondly, no, it's nothing like that. Look at the formula:
Um*Up >= Hbar
The uncertainty of the momentum (Mass*velocity) times the uncertainty of postion must be larger than Hbar (planks constant divided by 2 pi). So if Um = 0 (as is the case at absolute 0), what times 0 is larger than or equal to HBar? Clearly no finite number!
Now obviously theories cannot "prove" a negative. That is, I could try an experiment 100000000 times to show that a tennis ball cannot phase through a planet, however that only says it's very unlikely that it would happen, not that it's truely impossible. I was careful to say that according to quantum theory absolute zero is unattainable, however it could very well be wrong. It's been well tested though, and I for one have much confidence in it.
Interesting question though.
Cheers,
Justin
Not sure but was wondering wouldn't this be a kind of exception to Heizenberg since absolute zero is the state of no movement then it would seem you would lose the uncertainty in location because that wasn't changing.
Actually as much as you might think this... it's not! In fact, even situations where you surely would think the uncertainty principle doesn't apply, it turns out it does!
In an "empty space", you would think energy was zero. However, the uncertainty principle applies to all conjugate quantum variables (position/momentum, energy/time, etc)... So in any amount of space, if you measure the energy in it over a certain amount of time, you always have some uncertainty. Thus "empty space" must be seething with a roughly uniform amount of random energy.
The Casimir Effect is a manifestation of this which as been experimentally verified. Weird, eh?
As another poster mentioned, the Bose Einstein condensates form precisely due to this Heizenburg "expansion" due to cooling, and so Absolute Zero really isn't reachable. Sorry.
Cheers,
Justin
Why couldn't the particle just kind of phase out of reality and simultaniously exist everywhere at once.
Because we don't live on Star Trek.
The chances are that they'll never hit absolute zero
:)
You're more right than you know. According to current quantum mechanics (which has been tested inside and out), the Heizenberg uncertainty principle states that the more you know about the velocity of a partical, the less you can know about its position, etc. In other words, the uncertainties must multiply together to be greater than plank's constant divided by 2PI. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the uncertainty in momentum (which is a functional of thermal energy at that point, which is proportional to temperature) decreases. This causes the uncertainty in posiition to drastically increase.
Anyways at absolute zero this would mean the uncertainty in position would become infinite, in other words the position of the particle would be completely undefined. This is not possible so thus Absolute Zero is unattainable, even in theory.
Disclaimer: I'm still working on my degree, and I was in a hurry writing this. Please correct me if you can
Dude speak for yourself! Not all of us run around all day delivering pizza and playing with legos :-P
Cheers,
Justin
I work directly for Steve Squyres at Cornell, and I've also worked with Jim Bell before (although not so much any more).
:-D
:)
Squyres is quite a guy... I really love his management style... he keeps his nose out of things unless there's a big problem, then he dives right in
I wanna take one of his classes sometime but... doesn't look likely, as I'm so darn busy with everything else.
Cheers,
Justin
P.S. Squyres is the Principle Investigator of the mission, which means he's in charge of the science end of everything and making sure we get science back from the mission. I'm glad it's him and not me
Oh , I don't know about the maintenance - if you don't maintain a superconducting fuse widget (eg keep it cold.... er what else is there?) , I suspect that it'd stop working pretty quickly. This is opposed to 'normal' protection devices that fail to actuate when broken, a superconducting thingo would actuate when broken.
;-)
:-D
Wow, that's actually a very good point. I think though that your conclusion is exactly opposite of what it should be, however... Think of it this way: It is my experience that in large beaurocratic systems, things don't get fixed/done unless there's a problem. Poorly maintained breakers, etc, don't usually cause problems (they only cause problems in an emergency, by which time it's too late!) so they don't get much attention. There's plenty of attention on things when a distaster strikes (like a power outage)... You can bet people would get fired if these new superconducting "widgets" (as you called them) stop functioning during normal operations often. This means they will be properly maintained and thus more likely to work when tehre IS an emergency. Same reason that backup generators that are used often are maintained better than those that are rarely used.
So it'd seem to me that while you point out an exccelent difference, it actually works oppositely of how you think. A very cool inisight nevertheless.
(Notice my use of the technical terms 'widget' and 'thingo', and bow down to my enormous knowledge on the subject
At least you're not afraid to jokingly admit you're not an expert... Hell, I have 3 years of Physics at Cornell University and work for NASA doing software engineering, but that doesn't make me an expert about power grid stuff... Although I do understand most of the physics
Cheers,
Justin
Anyone who knows anything beyond EE 101 knows that trying to stop electicity over 30,000 volts is heading for trouble. Unless you have a huge insultor that is at least 500,000 Ohms, the electricty will just jump over it without even slowing down.
And anyone who knows any physics knows that that statement is bullshit without some sort of geometrical context.
Look at all the 350k powerlines out there... You don't see them arcing every day, because it's not voltage the makes the problem, it's electric field strength! These pipes are probably rather long, so the E-field strength that they will be experiencing should be quite small (E-field = potential / distance). The superconductors lose superconductivity during a surge, becoming a resister whose resistance is proportional to temperature. Due to I*R^2 ohmic heating, the resistance will shoot up rather quickly, thus cutting off the surge. Much of the surge's power will be turned into waste heat (I'd hate to have to design that cooling system) but it's much better than the alternative.
It should also be clarified that arcing occurs precisely because circuit breakers, being mechanical, are not large enough to keep the E-field to a level that won't ionize the surrounding atmosphere (allowing arcing).
Disclaimer: I'm a year away from my bachelors in Applied Physics.
Making the protection systems fancier isn't going to help too much if they don't install/maintain them properly.
This is not a simple matter of making the protection systems fancier... this is a fundamentally different approach to preventing cascade failure. It's orders of magnitude more robust (no arcing current, etc, as mentioned in the article) and there is no good reason why we shouldnt' have more robust systems.
These sort of things won't all be maintained properly, however it is my hope that after this blackout the maintainence system is revised to minimize negligence. Having these systems installed will help the well-maintained stations not suffer due to the problems of the ill-maintained... It makes the whole system much fairer and could possibly save a lot of money in the long run.
I also think that advancing superconducting technology is worth this effort alone, as it is a very promising field. A superconducting electric motor for an electric car would only have to be the size of a softball (extremely high magnetic field densities, and of course efficencies). Superconductors are being used in better bandpass filters for things like cellular telephone transceiver towers and possibly even space missions. Superconductors are also used for experiments with NMR quantum computing, and may hold the key to confined fusion (yes, a long way off I know).
You are correct that there is an issue to be addressed with maintainence, however I cannot see how this could do anything but help the situation.
Cheers,
Justin
P.S. Nice Kosh quote!
Disclaimer: I work for NASA, however I write software.
They should try to park the next one as far away from Hubble as possible. There might be some interesting things we could see with such a huge effective aperture.
Hmm... Not sure what exactly you mean by this. If you're talking simple parallax-based astrometry, the hubble c an already do this effectively by taking measurements of the same stars at different points in the Earth's revolution around Sol. This gives it an effective baseline of 2 A.U. No tandem satallite in earth orbit can possibly match that.
Perhaps you're talking about aperture synthesis interferometry? This is what is used by things like the Very Large Array... it involves single combination to extract additional imaging information from the phase differences. While that is very cool, at optical wavelengths (like those that Hubble uses) it would require Formation Flying to well within a wavelength of visible light (certainly impossible with any technology we have today, let alone already on the Hubble). The Terrestrial Planet Finder mission is possibly using a formation flying architecture to do infrared nulling interferometry (a different type of interferometry that allows them to filter out light from a star to see nearby planets). At optical wavelengths, it'd be nearly impossible.
Also don't forget that the larger your synthetic aperture, the more photons you need to collect to have a successful integration... This means that for very large baselines, (like the ones you suggest) you'd need *HUGE* telescopes looking for months on end.
Perhaps you meant something different?
Cheers,
Justin
don't know if they are already doing so, but it seems a natural match to use something like this in conjunction with a pulsejet.
Although the link you've provided is very interesting, I highly doubt that the two technologies are remotely compatable. The PDE is based on supersonic explosions that create shockwaves, whereas the TASHE uses sonic propagation of energy to achieve the desired result. The difference between the two methods is rather profound... almost all of the equations change when you allow shocks (suddenly everything's highly nonlinear, and you have infinite gradients, etc).
TASHE is a very cool technology, but it has only a superficial resemblence to the PDE. Nice to see someone's doing something with the old Sterling engine concept though.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Disclaimer: I'm starting my fourth year of physics at Cornell University.
I found the following numbers online:
EARTH'S WATER SUPPLY
Oceans97.3%
Ice 2.19%
Groundwater 0.5%
Soil Moisture0.005%
Atmosphere0.001%
Inland Lakes0.018%
Rivers 0.000096%
So if you wanted to have 10 times as much fresh water as we do now, that'd barely make a dent in the oceans, and I'm saying that in the future we wont' even NEED that much.
Run the numbers before you post something rediculous like desalination killing off species!
Justin
>> Soon we all might be able to walk to Russia during the summer!
Soon meaning a few thousand years?
Precisely. Geologists have finally started using software development timescales...
They say LA's about to get the "Big One" Real Soon now (whew!) Hopefully unlike the game, that quake will be vaporware.
Quoth the article: "You don't want to sail a ship over an erupting volcano," said Jennifer Reynolds, chief expedition scientist and a University of Alaska marine geologist.
Is this the same Jennifer Reynolds that works at the Freakin-Obvious department?
Water. We're running out as is, especially out in the midwest where it's all going to feed cows. The only way we could survive this long would be to be a planet of vegetarians. I'm all for it, but try convincing Texas that it can't eat meat anymore, even with impending doom down the road. Good luck.
Firstly... I don't know what planet you've been living on, but 3/4th of the earth's surface is covered in water. Desalination is not that difficult, and right now is mostly expensive due to the energies involved (clean cheap energy will change this). Combine this with the recycling technologies I mentioned (fully closed-system living/working units) and the ability to grow meat without the rest of the animal, and I think you have most of this covered.
A tremendous amount of the water we use is for things like toilet/shower/laundry and all of that will be easily recycled (locally even) in the future (technology exists now, just not practical). You need to factor this into your thinking.
I work at NASA as I said in my post and a lot of our technologies have plenty of uses on this spaceship we call earth.
Cheers,
Justin
"The future looks bright to those who know the way." - myself
That won't stop the AARP from trying it. Retirement age isn't being increased to keep up with life expectency yet, at what point are we going to start?
I'd assume that babyboomers retiring just might impact the system enough that it's re-examined.
A lot of things in life aren't dealt with until they actually cause problems. Doubly so for teh government. Make this an election issue, and I promise something will get done.
Besides don't a lot of the people on slashdot think the government is conspiring to control their lives more and more every day? If so... by the time retirement age is a problem, our dictator will have something done about it.
Cheers,
Justin
I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity? Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
;)
Actually I think it's a valid psychological point. A lot of individuals rationalize their dangerous behaviors in that they are going to "die sometime" anyways. The more you have to lose, the less likely you are to take a risk.
I think the more interesting point, and one the article failed to mention, is where are all these people going to live, what are they going to eat, and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement? With the population of earth already increasing rapidly extending lifespans to three times their current level would have a huge impact.
Those are indeed interesting questions. First of all, the assumption that people would continue to retire in their sixties if their lifespan extended is rather silly. People used to have a life expectancy of 40 years, but we certainly don't stop working at 40 now. Provided the quality of life is high ehough for them to be useful, I know plenty of elderly individuals who'd love to be productive again. Medical technology should allow them to be much more fit, robust, etc by then anyways.
As for where everyone is going to live, have you ever been to Wyoming? There's literally *TONS* of space, we haven't even come close to saturating earth spatially, not to mention skyscrapers will continue to be larger/taller.
As for what they are going to eat... underground farming is a possibility, and it's quite possible with the help of organic synthasizing implants the food intake required by a human could be drastically reduced. Between that and organic recycling technology, there's no reason a household could not eventually be a closed loop system that only required energy input (recycling water/organics). It's what astronauts do already!
As for the growth rate... A lot of developed countries have populations that are barely growing, or are shrinking even. As technology becomes more and more inexpensive and pervasive, developing countries will be able to catch up. Between this and advanced technology (much of which is coming from the space program, of which I am a part) I think a lot of these problems are solvable.
The biggest issue (which you didn't mention) is where are we going to get the energy for all of these people? I mean, there's theoretical power sources that could handle it, but will they be around in time? Controlled fusion perhaps, or maybe giant solar collectors in space... I predict that between biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics and computer science, in a hundred years the only real commodities left will be energy and information (from which anything else can be derived).
Yes there's plenty of interesting problems we will face as we head into the later part of the 21st century, however I am confident there will be equally interesting solutions. 10+ billion people have a way of overcoming difficulties. That is, if we don't kill ourselves first.
Oh yea! And what's going to happen when we run out of IPs for them all!? I'll sell mine on eBay for a ton of money, and stop wasting my time on slashdot