the "one intelligent person influences history" stuff
I agree, that individuals are probably not that important for thechnological advances. However, that does not mean, that technological advance is guaranteed to happen in a certain timeframe (say +-100years). IMHO the important "ingredient" are social circumstances. For technological advances to be made, society has to be tolerant enough to let people concentrate on "useless" things like pure science and help them doing so. Society has also to be tolerant enough to accept new technology and make use of it, because the use of one technology might be a prerequisite for another technology (e.g. electricity for computers).
Of course economy plays a big role as well.
Just take a look on the different cultures on earth, and see how they developed or not.
I should add that 78% of SETI@Home users, that filled out the poll, are in favor for sending out signals to ETs. OTOH, that means that 22% have certain doubts...
I didn't read "Solaris" (shame on me!) but even on Terra there are vast differences between different lifeforms, that would make communication difficult. Image the ETs have a livespan of only one day..or they live for 1000 years: they might be simply too fast for us or annoyingly slow. Then they might be as tiny as ants or bigger as dinosaurs ("oops, sorry, just stepped on another human, sorry, won't happen again"). Then they probably don't like our athmosphere or temperature range.
Nice idea. They have probably already done that on one of the other 80 CDs (but certainly not that detailed though). One should mark as well the positions of all known wrecks (e.g. Titanic, all those subs), that should give a pretty detailed picture of our level of technology once they dig some of them out.
It would be interesting to have a look at that "Library of Alexandria" that they intend to include. They should make that thing available on their website or even sell copies of it as regular CD-ROM. After all, I don't want to post something thats already there.
What information would be interesting for people in the distant future (not necessarily 50k years) ?
What information would WE like to have on our predecessors, that we don't have (because they didn't regard it as important enough) ?
There already exists a train using magnetic levitation, it's the german Transrapid (this is no new technology, it exists since the 1980ies). It can go as fast as 420 km/h (260 mph). Unfortunately industry and government couldn't agree on building it yet. There exists a test facility though and you can get a ride for a few bucks.
..transits of the moon or sun. Does anyone know of another site that provides this type of info?
This depends too much on your location..remember, ISS is 400km away whereas the moon is 300000km away. Then ISS moves so fast, it would probably be less than 10 seconds in front of the moon.
ISS *is* in "really low orbit" (about 400km), as a consequence it orbits earth every 90 minutes. You can see its path and realtime position here (need Java enabled).
As a replacement for the mouse, an eye tracking device would be pretty nice. You should be able to move the mouse pointer by just looking where it should go. The mouse buttons could be mapped to some key of the keyboard. One could even eliminate the mouse pointer (usually you know where you are looking at). People could develop the ability to move both eyes independently, thus having two "mouse pointers" and working twice as fast! (useful e.g. for drawing lines in GIMP or marking text or reading two/. articles at the same time).
The "Coal" itself is not radioactive. Its the (radioactive) halogen gas Radon that is set free when Coal is cracked. As a coal plant needs huge amount of coal to run (compared to the relative small amount of Uranium needed for nuclear plant), more Radon is set free by a properly run coal plant than by a properly run nuclear plant.
..for me would be one that combines Elite(space travel + trade) + System Shock (FPS + discovery) + Civilization (research + build up)
I'm definitely bored by bare FPS (shoot all that moves) - just pulling the trigger is too less interaction for me. The games I wasted incredible amount of time on: Civ, Deuteros, Millenium 2, Elite, Final Frontier, XCOM, Railroad Tycoon, Carrier Command, Mid Winter.
Now I'm not an expert for ion propulsion, but I can think of
some reasons why xenon rather than helium:
Helium leaks out very easily (in fact helium is the gas that leaks most easily,
it is used to trace vacuum leaks)
Helium is lighter than Xenon, i.e. the charge/mass ratio of the ions is probably worse (higher)
than for xenon. You want as much mass per charge as possible, in order to reduce space charge effects
(i.e. screening of the accelerating field by the ions)
Now Xenon isn't *that* expensive, probably just several kilo-bucks for those 80kg.
Unfortunately xenon is much more expensive than fuel *g* (don't know the
numbers though). Note that the energy for propulsion is provided by the
solar panels, the xenon gas only serves the purpose of being "thrown away"
at high velocity (>110000 km/h). This high exit velocity is the main advantage
over chemical propulsion (need less mass for same acceleration).
The general aim of the GIF cooperation is to build an attached coprocessor based on fast reconfigurable FPGAs. The main focus
on the work with the FPGAs is on the ability of sharing the hardware
of the FPGA between several tasks, running on the host CPU.
Usually, the FPGA is used exclusively by only one task on the host
CPU simultaneously. But, the configuration and readback features of
the FPGAs allows us to process several tasks in parallel on one
FPGA. The parallel execution can be divided into a real parallel
execution and a time multiplexed execution.
Because hardware nerds like to develop new hardware, rather than "boring" software.
They are better at designing new hardware than at improving software and it would
be a waste of their skills to make them write software (many would probably rather
quit your company than concentrate on software).
Plus you would loose the know how on hardware design (similar to how NASA lost
the know how of manned moon missions because they stopped doing it). Once you
loose know how, it is very expensive (and time consuming) to rebuild it.
Why serialize progress (first software then hardware) when you can parallelize it ?
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the "one intelligent person influences history" stuff
I agree, that individuals are probably not that important for thechnological advances. However, that does not mean, that technological advance is guaranteed to happen in a certain timeframe (say +-100years). IMHO the important "ingredient" are social circumstances. For technological advances to be made, society has to be tolerant enough to let people concentrate on "useless" things like pure science and help them doing so. Society has also to be tolerant enough to accept new technology and make use of it, because the use of one technology might be a prerequisite for another technology (e.g. electricity for computers). Of course economy plays a big role as well. Just take a look on the different cultures on earth, and see how they developed or not.I should add that 78% of SETI@Home users, that filled out the poll, are in favor for sending out signals to ETs. OTOH, that means that 22% have certain doubts...
...we aren't advertising that we're here...
The Question is: should we ? After all, with our limited ability to leave earth, we're basically a sitting duck right now. If ET behave like we did...I didn't read "Solaris" (shame on me!) but even on Terra there are vast differences between different lifeforms, that would make communication difficult. Image the ETs have a livespan of only one day..or they live for 1000 years: they might be simply too fast for us or annoyingly slow. Then they might be as tiny as ants or bigger as dinosaurs ("oops, sorry, just stepped on another human, sorry, won't happen again"). Then they probably don't like our athmosphere or temperature range.
Nice idea. They have probably already done that on one of the other 80 CDs (but certainly not that detailed though). One should mark as well the positions of all known wrecks (e.g. Titanic, all those subs), that should give a pretty detailed picture of our level of technology once they dig some of them out.
It would be interesting to have a look at that "Library of Alexandria" that they intend to include. They should make that thing available on their website or even sell copies of it as regular CD-ROM. After all, I don't want to post something thats already there.
What information would be interesting for people in the distant future (not necessarily 50k years) ?
What information would WE like to have on our predecessors, that we don't have (because they didn't regard it as important enough) ?
There already exists a train using magnetic levitation, it's the german Transrapid (this is no new technology, it exists since the 1980ies). It can go as fast as 420 km/h (260 mph). Unfortunately industry and government couldn't agree on building it yet. There exists a test facility though and you can get a ride for a few bucks.
This depends too much on your location..remember, ISS is 400km away whereas the moon is 300000km away. Then ISS moves so fast, it would probably be less than 10 seconds in front of the moon.
ISS *is* in "really low orbit" (about 400km), as a consequence it orbits earth every 90 minutes. You can see its path and realtime position here (need Java enabled).
The new thing is, that a ion drive is used as the *only* means of propulsion on a *deep*space* probe.
As a replacement for the mouse, an eye tracking device would be pretty nice. You should be able to move the mouse pointer by just looking where it should go. The mouse buttons could be mapped to some key of the keyboard. One could even eliminate the mouse pointer (usually you know where you are looking at). People could develop the ability to move both eyes independently, thus having two "mouse pointers" and working twice as fast! (useful e.g. for drawing lines in GIMP or marking text or reading two /. articles at the same time).
The "Coal" itself is not radioactive. Its the (radioactive) halogen gas Radon that is set free when Coal is cracked. As a coal plant needs huge amount of coal to run (compared to the relative small amount of Uranium needed for nuclear plant), more Radon is set free by a properly run coal plant than by a properly run nuclear plant.
..for me would be one that combines Elite(space travel + trade) + System Shock (FPS + discovery) + Civilization (research + build up)
I'm definitely bored by bare FPS (shoot all that moves) - just pulling the trigger is too less interaction for me. The games I wasted incredible amount of time on: Civ, Deuteros, Millenium 2, Elite, Final Frontier, XCOM, Railroad Tycoon, Carrier Command, Mid Winter.Now manipulating neutrinos is really hard - most of them pass right through earth without noticing it.
You will love studying physicsNow I'm not an expert for ion propulsion, but I can think of some reasons why xenon rather than helium:
- Helium leaks out very easily (in fact helium is the gas that leaks most easily,
it is used to trace vacuum leaks)
- Helium is lighter than Xenon, i.e. the charge/mass ratio of the ions is probably worse (higher)
than for xenon. You want as much mass per charge as possible, in order to reduce space charge effects
(i.e. screening of the accelerating field by the ions)
- Now Xenon isn't *that* expensive, probably just several kilo-bucks for those 80kg.
You may want to check this site: Xenon Ion Propulsion.They better send out Roger Wilco...
Unfortunately xenon is much more expensive than fuel *g* (don't know the numbers though). Note that the energy for propulsion is provided by the solar panels, the xenon gas only serves the purpose of being "thrown away" at high velocity (>110000 km/h). This high exit velocity is the main advantage over chemical propulsion (need less mass for same acceleration).
Usually, the FPGA is used exclusively by only one task on the host CPU simultaneously. But, the configuration and readback features of the FPGAs allows us to process several tasks in parallel on one FPGA. The parallel execution can be divided into a real parallel execution and a time multiplexed execution.
Read more...
Why serialize progress (first software then hardware) when you can parallelize it ?
Check this out: Einstein Biography and those of related scientists.