i have a problem with the common assumption that worlds like earth that teem with life will spawn a super intelligent species. on our own planet the coming of intelligence was not a given, it was a random effect helped by a couple of well timed asteroids and a relatively stable place in the galactic arm, plus the right amount of radiation. brains are expensive organs and without the dramatic climactic changes that helped proto-humans become dominant most species would not bother with a large complex brain.
insects do quite well without them.
SETI's use of Drake's Equation places f(i) (the number of intelligent species on planets that are already in the right zone and have already spawned life) as 1. this is totally proposterous to me.
no pointing problems with radio? both the messages we sent were not omnidirectional. the amount of power required to send an omnidirectional radio wave are staggering and not currently achievable.
the two we sent were quite focused. and radio waves face a bigger problem than light waves, that is phasing with the incredible numbers of radio waves in the universe. there's a lot less light to colide and phase with.
am i the only one who thinks that seti@home is the biggest waste of cpu cycles ever?
it's immensely popular because:
1. it was the first popular distributed project that was more easily understood by the public than breaking some 64-bit code.
2. communicating with aliens has been a primary theme in science fiction in the last 100 years
3. many so called spiritual people have turned from believing in the Supreme Being to superior beings.
4. X-Files
there's no doubt there is/was/will be intelligent life out there. but i think it's much rarer than most people think. the incredible series of events that created intelligence on earth is staggering in complexity and randomness. granted, there are probably many other random even paths that lead to intelligence, keep in mind that intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable. it's a strategy a small part of the animal kingdom happened to stumble across here on earth but it was all luck that allowed intelligence to survive. if it wasn't for a couple of well timed asteroids, the proper amount of radiation, etc. the world would now be owned by insects (and maybe one day it will) as they are the most efficient form of life on the planet.
so lets assume that intelligence is needed in sending a coherent message that we can detect. how long have we, as the human race have had the capability of generating radio waves. a century perhaps?
if the universe has a finite age, we can assume that the development of intelligent life took some window of time and it's not an unreasonable assumption that any intelligent life in the universe had only evolved to the point of sending radio waves in say the last million years.
and here's the kicker. how long will an intelligent lifeform survive? we have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already. every year more ways of wiping out the intelligent population on our planet are developed. if anything, we're more at risk because most of us have relaxed since the end of the Cold War. how long do we have? lets say 400 more years before something catastrophic happens (i think further out and that and we may have settled enough extra terrestial worlds that we'll make it, but that's a big if).
we have to assume that other intelligent races will face similar problems as we do, intelligence came out of competition, after all, so do wars and tribal/religious persecution...
So lets say the average window during which an intelligent species can broadcast a meaningful radio message is 500 years.
combine this with the time to intelligence mentioned earlier and we have a very tiny portion of space that SETI can cover considering the limitations of light speed.
and this is assuming that the intelligent species that happens to be in the perfect region actually bothered to develop radio waves in the first place (or equipment that sends radio off as a side effect). not every atmosphere will bounce radio waves the way it does on earth, maybe our otherwise perfectly located race never needed radio, they developed a different communication system (light based) or have ESP or something.
my point is that yes there is life out there, but this seti@home project is a pipe dream. we are using billions of cpu cycles for something it may be impossible to find. ever. and think of another thing, 99.9999999999999999999999999% of your these precious cpu cycles are used to analyze completely random noise. at least if the seti@home shared their cpus with other radio astronomy projects, that would be cool.
use your cycles at folding@home or similar projects instead. every work unit is meaningful and the possible results of f@h have the potential to be immediately useful to humans now.
i don't expect seti@home to go away, but i do wish people would stop caring less about the stats and get off the et kicks and realize that crunching useless data is still the same as not using your cpu idle time at all.
there are other distributed projects that are much more meaningful but can hardly get started because of seti@home's success which is mainly driven by media and the recent infatutation with the super natural into which et's fall for some bizarre reason...
Stop blaming NASA. It's the american public that is keeping NASA from getting shit done. Think about it. The Challenger explosion messed up NASA for almost 8 years. You think that would stop the Russians?
When the Apollo astronauts entered the Soyuz in 1975 they were appalled at the state of the russian capsule and the lack of safety equipment.
NASA has to deal with regulations hundreds of times more strict than the Russians.
I'd say NASA did pretty damn well considering they had to deal with the Joe Q. Public, American, the biggest coward on the planet.
I think it's only fair if current interstate tax laws applicable to mail order are followed for internet sales taxing. For example, I don't have to pay tax in CA or NY if I live in CA and buy something from NY.
>(btw - if the distance for a light round trip is > speed of light * age of universe we wouldn't see ourselves anyway).
in fact, what if that's what DEFINES the size of the universe in the first place... maybe the universe expands as it grows older so the circumference is equal to exactly c*a (c = speed of light, a = age of universe)...
which would explain why it was a singularity at the zero moment.
If it turned out that we were looking back at our own past, curved space and all? Maybe what we're seeing is our region of space 5 billion years ago. Maybe one of those 1000 galaxies is the Milky Way around the time the solar system was forming...
And if you think about it, this is the way it should be. The states with the largest Electoral Vote counts are states with big cities. It's unclear what the right balance is, to me, but I'm sure that a pure popular vote is unfair considering that urban folk and rural folk have tremendously different needs from the government. Since many of the smaller states actually have an important economic function (think food production) you can't just discount them because they have a smaller population than states like NY with cities like NYC.
In other words, I believe a purely popular vote would give too much power to the cities, and I don't think that's such a good idea (fyi, I've been a city dweller all my life so I'm not being biased here).
Now you could argue that this is what the state governments are for, but remember that the president does get to propose and veto things like budget which includes farm subsidies, educational reforms, and so on; and other legislature that can be quite differentiating for urban vs. rural dwellers. I really think that we would be naive to believe that a simple majority vote in the election of the president is what should decide the president.
I'm amazed at how the geek community embraced Napster.
First off, since when would anyone in their right mind install a piece of software who's whole point is to give unknown users access to your hard drive.
We trounced on MS and Netscape because of minor bugs that allowed someone unscroupulous to look at, gasp, a cookie file.
And then we install a piece of crap like Napster which is as buggy and poorly written as IM was in it's first version and we defend it like it's some sort of fucking holy grail.
We once again allowed a broken protocol, a broken app to become a killer ap, simply because we're stupid.. And greedy. Stupid and greedy, two of the driving forces in the community it would seem.
The peer to peer paradigm needs an RFC, a bunch of SMART folks to put together something that's secure, and it needs to be in the open source community so that it can be reviewed by a body of smart security geeks. Gnutella is a step in the right direction, but it's a kneejerk reaction, not a well thought out solution.
I think Napster is evil, but not because of what it does to the music industry, but rather what it does to our industry. It sets a precedent to allow easily hackable software to run continuously on our already mostly unsecure desktop machines. Doesn't that just sound prepostrous???
because we live in such a happy place where resources are seemingly never going to run out (so not true), we are spoiled and made to love our SUVs, Hummers, and sports cars. I will gladly buy an alternative fuel vehicle for the main family car. But I'm still going to keep my 66 mustang, and I'll be darned if I give up the 130hp motorcycle I own... (try getting 130hp out of an electric or natural gas motor on a motorcycle...) ~J
It should be renamed "the search of intelligence at Berkeley". Bastards wasted unbelievable amounts of computer time with that stupid bug that caused everyone to get the same segment of data to crunch. Then they couldn't get their act together on the website.
But the graphics sure are neat (and note, they don't run on NT servers because they need 256 colors DUH!)
Goddamn waste of time, and they certainly don't get MY machine time.
Good post, I see you know your Lem:) Actually, if the FTL research is really true, perhaps space travel will be possible. And hey, they found water on Mars too! It's all so damn depressing:(
Come on, you mainstream techno boy... The microbots in this article have been predicted and described in detail long before Stephenson even started writing (a hellish day that was). Greg Bear has been writing about this shit for a decade, Stanislaw Lem for 2 decades. I am SO fucking tired of Stephenson's books used as a reference like he's some sort of big time thinker. Yeah, and he predicted virtual reality too, my ass...
Slashdot Mirror
i hope that wasn't my typo... there's a "WE" missing in there :)
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
i have a problem with the common assumption that worlds like earth that teem with life will spawn a super intelligent species. on our own planet the coming of intelligence was not a given, it was a random effect helped by a couple of well timed asteroids and a relatively stable place in the galactic arm, plus the right amount of radiation. brains are expensive organs and without the dramatic climactic changes that helped proto-humans become dominant most species would not bother with a large complex brain.
insects do quite well without them.
SETI's use of Drake's Equation places f(i) (the number of intelligent species on planets that are already in the right zone and have already spawned life) as 1. this is totally proposterous to me.
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
no pointing problems with radio? both the messages we sent were not omnidirectional. the amount of power required to send an omnidirectional radio wave are staggering and not currently achievable.
the two we sent were quite focused. and radio waves face a bigger problem than light waves, that is phasing with the incredible numbers of radio waves in the universe. there's a lot less light to colide and phase with.
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
am i the only one who thinks that seti@home is the biggest waste of cpu cycles ever?
it's immensely popular because:
1. it was the first popular distributed project that was more easily understood by the public than breaking some 64-bit code.
2. communicating with aliens has been a primary theme in science fiction in the last 100 years
3. many so called spiritual people have turned from believing in the Supreme Being to superior beings.
4. X-Files
there's no doubt there is/was/will be intelligent life out there. but i think it's much rarer than most people think. the incredible series of events that created intelligence on earth is staggering in complexity and randomness. granted, there are probably many other random even paths that lead to intelligence, keep in mind that intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable. it's a strategy a small part of the animal kingdom happened to stumble across here on earth but it was all luck that allowed intelligence to survive. if it wasn't for a couple of well timed asteroids, the proper amount of radiation, etc. the world would now be owned by insects (and maybe one day it will) as they are the most efficient form of life on the planet.
so lets assume that intelligence is needed in sending a coherent message that we can detect. how long have we, as the human race have had the capability of generating radio waves. a century perhaps?
if the universe has a finite age, we can assume that the development of intelligent life took some window of time and it's not an unreasonable assumption that any intelligent life in the universe had only evolved to the point of sending radio waves in say the last million years.
and here's the kicker. how long will an intelligent lifeform survive? we have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already. every year more ways of wiping out the intelligent population on our planet are developed. if anything, we're more at risk because most of us have relaxed since the end of the Cold War. how long do we have? lets say 400 more years before something catastrophic happens (i think further out and that and we may have settled enough extra terrestial worlds that we'll make it, but that's a big if).
we have to assume that other intelligent races will face similar problems as we do, intelligence came out of competition, after all, so do wars and tribal/religious persecution...
So lets say the average window during which an intelligent species can broadcast a meaningful radio message is 500 years.
combine this with the time to intelligence mentioned earlier and we have a very tiny portion of space that SETI can cover considering the limitations of light speed.
and this is assuming that the intelligent species that happens to be in the perfect region actually bothered to develop radio waves in the first place (or equipment that sends radio off as a side effect). not every atmosphere will bounce radio waves the way it does on earth, maybe our otherwise perfectly located race never needed radio, they developed a different communication system (light based) or have ESP or something.
my point is that yes there is life out there, but this seti@home project is a pipe dream. we are using billions of cpu cycles for something it may be impossible to find. ever. and think of another thing, 99.9999999999999999999999999% of your these precious cpu cycles are used to analyze completely random noise. at least if the seti@home shared their cpus with other radio astronomy projects, that would be cool.
use your cycles at folding@home or similar projects instead. every work unit is meaningful and the possible results of f@h have the potential to be immediately useful to humans now.
i don't expect seti@home to go away, but i do wish people would stop caring less about the stats and get off the et kicks and realize that crunching useless data is still the same as not using your cpu idle time at all.
there are other distributed projects that are much more meaningful but can hardly get started because of seti@home's success which is mainly driven by media and the recent infatutation with the super natural into which et's fall for some bizarre reason...
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
I'd say NASA did pretty damn well considering they had to deal with the Joe Q. Public, American, the biggest coward on the planet.
:)
except for the french
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
Stop blaming NASA. It's the american public that is keeping NASA from getting shit done. Think about it. The Challenger explosion messed up NASA for almost 8 years. You think that would stop the Russians?
When the Apollo astronauts entered the Soyuz in 1975 they were appalled at the state of the russian capsule and the lack of safety equipment.
NASA has to deal with regulations hundreds of times more strict than the Russians.
I'd say NASA did pretty damn well considering they had to deal with the Joe Q. Public, American, the biggest coward on the planet.
~y
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j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
how much longer is "florida election humour" going to be moderated as funny? 'cause it's not...
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j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
but... VBR doesn't stream well. i have an mp3 jukebox running icecast that various machines listen too over the network. VBR crackles and pops.
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j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
that's why they're in the RBL...
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
I think it's only fair if current interstate tax laws applicable to mail order are followed for internet sales taxing. For example, I don't have to pay tax in CA or NY if I live in CA and buy something from NY.
>(btw - if the distance for a light round trip is > speed of light * age of universe we wouldn't see ourselves anyway).
in fact, what if that's what DEFINES the size of the universe in the first place... maybe the universe expands as it grows older so the circumference is equal to exactly c*a (c = speed of light, a = age of universe)...
which would explain why it was a singularity at the zero moment.
If it turned out that we were looking back at our own past, curved space and all? Maybe what we're seeing is our region of space 5 billion years ago. Maybe one of those 1000 galaxies is the Milky Way around the time the solar system was forming...
And if you think about it, this is the way it should be. The states with the largest Electoral Vote counts are states with big cities. It's unclear what the right balance is, to me, but I'm sure that a pure popular vote is unfair considering that urban folk and rural folk have tremendously different needs from the government. Since many of the smaller states actually have an important economic function (think food production) you can't just discount them because they have a smaller population than states like NY with cities like NYC.
In other words, I believe a purely popular vote would give too much power to the cities, and I don't think that's such a good idea (fyi, I've been a city dweller all my life so I'm not being biased here).
Now you could argue that this is what the state governments are for, but remember that the president does get to propose and veto things like budget which includes farm subsidies, educational reforms, and so on; and other legislature that can be quite differentiating for urban vs. rural dwellers. I really think that we would be naive to believe that a simple majority vote in the election of the president is what should decide the president.
-y
I'm amazed at how the geek community embraced Napster. First off, since when would anyone in their right mind install a piece of software who's whole point is to give unknown users access to your hard drive. We trounced on MS and Netscape because of minor bugs that allowed someone unscroupulous to look at, gasp, a cookie file. And then we install a piece of crap like Napster which is as buggy and poorly written as IM was in it's first version and we defend it like it's some sort of fucking holy grail. We once again allowed a broken protocol, a broken app to become a killer ap, simply because we're stupid.. And greedy. Stupid and greedy, two of the driving forces in the community it would seem. The peer to peer paradigm needs an RFC, a bunch of SMART folks to put together something that's secure, and it needs to be in the open source community so that it can be reviewed by a body of smart security geeks. Gnutella is a step in the right direction, but it's a kneejerk reaction, not a well thought out solution. I think Napster is evil, but not because of what it does to the music industry, but rather what it does to our industry. It sets a precedent to allow easily hackable software to run continuously on our already mostly unsecure desktop machines. Doesn't that just sound prepostrous???
Come on, this "article" is such a troll!!!
because we live in such a happy place where resources are seemingly never going to run out (so not true), we are spoiled and made to love our SUVs, Hummers, and sports cars. I will gladly buy an alternative fuel vehicle for the main family car. But I'm still going to keep my 66 mustang, and I'll be darned if I give up the 130hp motorcycle I own... (try getting 130hp out of an electric or natural gas motor on a motorcycle...) ~J
It should be renamed "the search of intelligence at Berkeley". Bastards wasted unbelievable amounts of computer time with that stupid bug that caused everyone to get the same segment of data to crunch. Then they couldn't get their act together on the website.
But the graphics sure are neat (and note, they don't run on NT servers because they need 256 colors DUH!)
Goddamn waste of time, and they certainly don't get MY machine time.
Good post, I see you know your Lem :) Actually, if the FTL research is really true, perhaps space travel will be possible. And hey, they found water on Mars too! It's all so damn depressing :(
Because emmet is a poser?
Come on, you mainstream techno boy... The microbots in this article have been predicted and described in detail long before Stephenson even started writing (a hellish day that was). Greg Bear has been writing about this shit for a decade, Stanislaw Lem for 2 decades. I am SO fucking tired of Stephenson's books used as a reference like he's some sort of big time thinker. Yeah, and he predicted virtual reality too, my ass...
to get rid of their untouchable castes for sure... Bastards!
Wasn't there a guy on real people 15 years ago who claimed to be doing this? What happaned to him?