I'd be cautious with subsidizing - it has downsides. See, Dieselgate actually goes back to the German government giving tax breaks on diesel fuel to help transportation; it led to private car owners demanding diesel cars and manufacturer following that demand. So in the end the entire German car industry was led into the wrong direction.
NASA is very good at exploration. Actually what they did with all the probes they sent to Mars and the other planets is to lay the groundworks for going there. Now that we know there's water on Mars, we can actually seriously consider going there. This exploration is a very valuable service and since the information provided to everyone it's less likely to create wrong incentives.
If someone other than SpaceX wants to go, by all means they should. Whether it's smart to replicate the effort - probably not in the beginning. Would be smarter to team up - SpaceX does the transportation, another company the spaceport, another the stations etc. There are so many gaps to be filled, no need to step on each others feet. It's one reason why Musk keep drumming for his mission - he needs collaborators.
Don't think there will be conflict over mineral rights. There's tons of resources in space. The asteroid belt has more than enough.
Main problem is now how to jumpstart the entire business. It probably needs SpaceX leading the pack and just creating the demand.
It's actually not a big hurdle, because nobody on Mars would be foolish enough to declare political independence before being economically (or materially) independent. If they did that the host country could just stop sending supplies. There will be a long time before you can manufacture everything on Mars (or in space). Most notably it won't make sense to produce computer chips on Mars since (i) they won't need many, (ii) chips are relatively low mass items, easy to ship from earth, (iii) chip fabs are relatively big and very specific facilities that only break even if you produce many millions of identical chips.
Having said that I would probably be natural if Mars became a somewhat politically detached entity from their host countries. At minimum they'd ask for "no taxation without representation" - I believe there's a precedent for that.
Why the United States? I'd be surprised if they were the only country going for Mars. In fact, I'm fairly sure that China will push for Mars too, or maybe even get there first if the US let's it slip. They are already planning to send a rover in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Such big projects don't come without a political or at least economic agenda China. Countries like Luxemburg are also preparing their coffers - excuse me: laws: http://www.spaceresources.publ...
There is no "pressure" needed for anti-aging because there is a strong market pull (demand). Just ask your wife how much she's spending on anti-aging lotions etc.
Joking aside - there have been tremendous advances in extending life expectancy worldwide: https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo
NASA--the National Aeronautical and Space Administration doesn't manufacture that much. They manage projects, contract out to subcontractors and then assemble the stuff and then put the NASA sticker on it. Their strength is in having subject matter experts, long term view, strong project management, strong quality and risk management (some say too strong), and lots of funding (no fear of going bankrupt). What they do is define interfaces to make sure everything will fit together, manage timelines etc. SpaceX on the other hand is very vertically integrated (read any of the stories how Musk started SpaceX).
SpaceX are the first ones to demonstrate reusable boosters, if that's not new ground, what is? The whole industry considered reusability impossible. It's key to bring costs down. The entire launch industry is scrambling to catch up with SpaceX.
Yes, Musk sets dates - it's important to set goals and deadlines - how else can you meet them if they are not set and known? One of the key criticism against NASA (by Zubrin for example) is that their goals are too far out, exposing them to political trends.
Who actually cares if Musk misses a goal by a year or two? We know that his goals are ambitious - he does this to put his company under pressure to try and meet these goals. Still, I believe if SpaceX is two years late (which I expect they will) he'll still be 10 years faster than any government.
Managing the charging state and thermal management of lithium ion batteries are essential. Additives play a significant role for lifetime. Please watch this vidoe where Jeff Dahn explains their experiments concerning life time
Why would one want to leave earth? My personal guesses:
1. political reasons (want to try new whatever-ism and found your own country) 2. religious reasons (escape prosecution / harassment) 3. tax reasons (in case all existing tax havens get busted) 4. earth too crowded 5. FOMO (for countries, ex: China)
Just remember why people went to the new world.
Once you have a critical mass in space there will be demand of stuff which will drive space mining and from there it's going to grow.
TFA warps facts beyond recognition. You need to read the Arxiv preprint article (linked in another post) to figure out what's actually going on:
There are two processes: Electrons are accelerated to relativistic energies (50-300 MeV, variable) by laser wakefield acceleration using most of the laser beam. Google that - there lots of interesting material.
The other part of the laser beam is sent around the other way and hits those high energy electrons more-or-less head on and they undergo a Compton scattering process, transferring (lots of) energy from one electron to one photon.
So its plasma physics and high energy physics - no solid state involved other than in the driving laser.
They get a peak brightness of about 10^19 photons s^-1 mm^-2 mrad^-2 (per 0.1% bandwidth) at 1 MeV photon energy. Peak means at the peak of a 30fs short pulse.
That definition basically translates to "lots of light in one direction and in a narrow spectral range, per unit time" - squeezing the light in every imaginable way to make it as well-defined/focused as possible. This makes your LED lose in a lot of ways: because it's not pulsed, the light is all over the place instead of well collimated (straight like a laser), and oh yours are not x-ray photons - these carry about 10,000x more energy, each.
Their driving laser (Diocles) is another story though: it has more than 1 Joule of optical(!) pulse energy. That's probably more light in one pulse than your LED will generate in its entire life. And that comes in a pulse that's only 33 femtoseconds short, that's 0.000000000000033 seconds. Not even the biggest laser, though.
Your prior work is theory. This work is experimental. And no, it doesn't reach Schwinger limit - they don't even try since they don't focus the entire primary laser pulse into one spot. Moreover, UNL's Diocles laser has "only" 100TW peak power, more than a factor 10 below today's state-of-the-art. The goal here was to generate short intense x-ray pulses with (relatively) narrow spectral bandwidth.
Your theory article cites the ELI project as one that would be capable of (maybe) generating intensities four orders of magnitude below the Schwinger limit. However the ELI project got a little bit side-tracked: instead of building one big laser they settled for three much smaller lasers, basically because no country (i.e. neither France nor Germany) wanted to foot the bill for such a moonshot project. The funny thing is that the highest intensity lasers (Petawatt class) are commercial ones (including most of the ELI lasers) - it seems that research institutions can really keep pace in this field.
What you describe is almost right. Yes, laser photons scatter with electrons to generate x-ray photons, but the process is Compton scattering, not harmonics generation. The electrons are laser wakefield-accelerated (i.e. free) electrons of about 55 MeV kinetic energy (yes, capital M) , not valence electrons. Compton scattering analog would be playing billiard with electrons an photons: You can transfer energy from electrons to photons. In this case you take a fat high-energy (moving) electron and hit that with a low energy laser photon. This transfers a lot of kinetic energy onto the photon making it an x-ray photon, basically. There are no atoms involved in the primary process, so there is no re-emission and no decay - it's just scattering.
From the businesses point of view it's seldom good to be not in control of the sales side of business.
The well-known brands have spent a lot of money to be a well-known brand. In return they expect more customers, especially those who are too lazy to do a proper market research before making a decision (aka "loyal customer").
Travel agencies and booking agents increase market transparency - that's good for the customer, not the businesses. Increased transparency means that customers find the Hotel Noname or recently opened house, or that they can compare all the choices with reasonable effort.
Those aggregators flourish in markets with low transparent, typically markets with so many choices that it's difficult or time-consuming to compare them all, or sometimes even find all available choices.
Having said that, what you suggest is probably what hotels will be left with. It's just that they don't like to hear it.
I didn't say that money is a resource, merely replying to your statement implying that there is a shortage of money (as you agree, there isn't).
You are right, if there is a mismatch between goods and money circulating it will lead to inflation or deflation - undesirable at excessive levels - the level of about 1-2% inflation seems to lead to the most stable economy. By all means, if there is a shortage of goods / services (i.e. the historic examples you cite) do not implement UBI - that would be foolish. However assuming that we have heavily automated production and services there is no shortage of goods - in fact there is overabundance of goods which leads to shortage of labor and decline of prices (what we begin see today). In that case UBI might be a solution that takes away pressure on the labor market (oversupply) and provides more demand. Of course it has to be balanced well with the economic power of the country in question. Obviously, you can't give everybody one million dollar (not today, when we still need doctors and firemen). It has to be a small amount so achievers are still motivated to work but big enough such that people left behind are not totally extracted from the economy (which may collapse the economy).
Since it's difficult to reason what amount exactly is right the Finnish experiment is so important. I think it's a very difficult transition to go from the goods-scarcity economy to the post-scarcity economy. It might be a transition where we fail the first few times we try (i.e. social unrest, dark ages) - but I hope we at least give it our best shot.
I believe you are referring to trawling fishery. That's a choice we make that we want to eat that much fish and use that technology to catch fish. Doesn't have to be that way.
Global warming - that's presumably related to increased CO2 levels. We can chose to reduce CO2 levels by reducing fossil fuel consumption and switching to other (sustainable) sources / fuels of energy.
Reducing population won't help the cause of pollution reduction because it will trigger economic problems that will make us turn away from sustainable technologies which presently require investment. If anything we have to at least maintain population level to create a stable economic basis.
The true challenge is to bring prosperity to the poor countries which currently have locally unsustainable population growth. This often a political problem though. Increasing prosperity usually leads to slowing down population growth.
There isn't any shortage of resources that I'm aware of. Maybe locally, people are short of certain resources - that's a distribution problem. Globally, we have enough of everything. Pollution and destruction of environment is a choice that we make (in some countries). For example, as long as we decide to use combustion engine cars for transport, that's a choice that will result in higher pollution levels compared to electric cars. We don't have to stick to that choice.
Maybe you know a resource that's in short supply globally and cannot be replaced?
Come on, that's just a slightly more advanced version of Paint's fill bucket. A task that can be done by anyone with a few simple instructions isn't creative. It's probably boring work that was begging to become automated.
If anything the graphs you cite actually support Waffle Iron's point: Output grew faster than Compensation in the last couple of years. Increased automation is likely the reason.
The graph doesn't make any statement about unemployment though. Compensation increases due to higher wages for same amount of working hours.
That's fine. Most people get bored of lazing around sooner or later. Maybe you'd create great art. Being immune to peer pressure is a great predisposition to that end. I'm optimistic.
Thanks to the internet today it's easier (and cheaper) than ever before to let people know about your product - you just need to be smart about it. Just start a blog or a YT channel about pissing in people's mouth and build up the community, you'll succeed eventually if there is indeed a market.
Doesn't mean you are guaranteed to be successful with every stupid idea - you still need a working product and people willing to pay for it. I'm skeptic about your proposed pissing business. I don't doubt you could achieve satisfactory quality of service but there could be a problem finding people willing to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Even before that the question is whether AI will have a grasp of "self". Will it be socially aware?
I'd be cautious with subsidizing - it has downsides. See, Dieselgate actually goes back to the German government giving tax breaks on diesel fuel to help transportation; it led to private car owners demanding diesel cars and manufacturer following that demand. So in the end the entire German car industry was led into the wrong direction.
NASA is very good at exploration. Actually what they did with all the probes they sent to Mars and the other planets is to lay the groundworks for going there. Now that we know there's water on Mars, we can actually seriously consider going there. This exploration is a very valuable service and since the information provided to everyone it's less likely to create wrong incentives.
If someone other than SpaceX wants to go, by all means they should. Whether it's smart to replicate the effort - probably not in the beginning. Would be smarter to team up - SpaceX does the transportation, another company the spaceport, another the stations etc. There are so many gaps to be filled, no need to step on each others feet. It's one reason why Musk keep drumming for his mission - he needs collaborators.
Don't think there will be conflict over mineral rights. There's tons of resources in space. The asteroid belt has more than enough.
Main problem is now how to jumpstart the entire business. It probably needs SpaceX leading the pack and just creating the demand.
yes, what people get are "a few colorful beads"
https://youtu.be/JJ1yS9JIJKs?t...
It's actually not a big hurdle, because nobody on Mars would be foolish enough to declare political independence before being economically (or materially) independent. If they did that the host country could just stop sending supplies.
There will be a long time before you can manufacture everything on Mars (or in space). Most notably it won't make sense to produce computer chips on Mars since (i) they won't need many, (ii) chips are relatively low mass items, easy to ship from earth, (iii) chip fabs are relatively big and very specific facilities that only break even if you produce many millions of identical chips.
Having said that I would probably be natural if Mars became a somewhat politically detached entity from their host countries. At minimum they'd ask for "no taxation without representation" - I believe there's a precedent for that.
Why the United States? I'd be surprised if they were the only country going for Mars. In fact, I'm fairly sure that China will push for Mars too, or maybe even get there first if the US let's it slip. They are already planning to send a rover in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Such big projects don't come without a political or at least economic agenda China.
Countries like Luxemburg are also preparing their coffers - excuse me: laws: http://www.spaceresources.publ...
There is no "pressure" needed for anti-aging because there is a strong market pull (demand). Just ask your wife how much she's spending on anti-aging lotions etc.
Joking aside - there have been tremendous advances in extending life expectancy worldwide: https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo
You may educate yourself here with more updated numbers: https://www.gapminder.org/
Their entire budget is certainly big - problem is most of it is earmarked for many ongoing projects and there is little left for discretionary use.
Moreover, now they have to fly to the moon first before they can send people to Mars: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...
NASA--the National Aeronautical and Space Administration doesn't manufacture that much. They manage projects, contract out to subcontractors and then assemble the stuff and then put the NASA sticker on it. Their strength is in having subject matter experts, long term view, strong project management, strong quality and risk management (some say too strong), and lots of funding (no fear of going bankrupt). What they do is define interfaces to make sure everything will fit together, manage timelines etc.
SpaceX on the other hand is very vertically integrated (read any of the stories how Musk started SpaceX).
SpaceX are the first ones to demonstrate reusable boosters, if that's not new ground, what is? The whole industry considered reusability impossible. It's key to bring costs down. The entire launch industry is scrambling to catch up with SpaceX.
Yes, Musk sets dates - it's important to set goals and deadlines - how else can you meet them if they are not set and known? One of the key criticism against NASA (by Zubrin for example) is that their goals are too far out, exposing them to political trends.
Who actually cares if Musk misses a goal by a year or two? We know that his goals are ambitious - he does this to put his company under pressure to try and meet these goals.
Still, I believe if SpaceX is two years late (which I expect they will) he'll still be 10 years faster than any government.
Managing the charging state and thermal management of lithium ion batteries are essential. Additives play a significant role for lifetime. Please watch this vidoe where Jeff Dahn explains their experiments concerning life time
https://youtu.be/9qi03QawZEk
Btw, also contains a comparison between several manufacturer's batteries,
Why would one want to leave earth? My personal guesses:
1. political reasons (want to try new whatever-ism and found your own country)
2. religious reasons (escape prosecution / harassment)
3. tax reasons (in case all existing tax havens get busted)
4. earth too crowded
5. FOMO (for countries, ex: China)
Just remember why people went to the new world.
Once you have a critical mass in space there will be demand of stuff which will drive space mining and from there it's going to grow.
TFA warps facts beyond recognition. You need to read the Arxiv preprint article (linked in another post) to figure out what's actually going on:
There are two processes: Electrons are accelerated to relativistic energies (50-300 MeV, variable) by laser wakefield acceleration using most of the laser beam. Google that - there lots of interesting material.
The other part of the laser beam is sent around the other way and hits those high energy electrons more-or-less head on and they undergo a Compton scattering process, transferring (lots of) energy from one electron to one photon.
So its plasma physics and high energy physics - no solid state involved other than in the driving laser.
Not more photons. See https://www.rp-photonics.com/s...
and http://scienceworld.wolfram.co... for their definition.
They get a peak brightness of about 10^19 photons s^-1 mm^-2 mrad^-2 (per 0.1% bandwidth) at 1 MeV photon energy. Peak means at the peak of a 30fs short pulse.
Actually, by your definition, yes. Their x-ray pulses have a rather low number of photons (about a million per shot). However, physicists use a different definition for brightness: http://scienceworld.wolfram.co...
and
https://www.rp-photonics.com/s...
That definition basically translates to "lots of light in one direction and in a narrow spectral range, per unit time" - squeezing the light in every imaginable way to make it as well-defined/focused as possible. This makes your LED lose in a lot of ways: because it's not pulsed, the light is all over the place instead of well collimated (straight like a laser), and oh yours are not x-ray photons - these carry about 10,000x more energy, each.
Their driving laser (Diocles) is another story though: it has more than 1 Joule of optical(!) pulse energy. That's probably more light in one pulse than your LED will generate in its entire life. And that comes in a pulse that's only 33 femtoseconds short, that's 0.000000000000033 seconds. Not even the biggest laser, though.
By using an electric field, in this case a photon.
Look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
section Compton scattering applies to this article.
Basically, hitting electrons with other things is the bread and butter of high energy physics.
Your prior work is theory. This work is experimental. And no, it doesn't reach Schwinger limit - they don't even try since they don't focus the entire primary laser pulse into one spot. Moreover, UNL's Diocles laser has "only" 100TW peak power, more than a factor 10 below today's state-of-the-art.
The goal here was to generate short intense x-ray pulses with (relatively) narrow spectral bandwidth.
Your theory article cites the ELI project as one that would be capable of (maybe) generating intensities four orders of magnitude below the Schwinger limit. However the ELI project got a little bit side-tracked: instead of building one big laser they settled for three much smaller lasers, basically because no country (i.e. neither France nor Germany) wanted to foot the bill for such a moonshot project.
The funny thing is that the highest intensity lasers (Petawatt class) are commercial ones (including most of the ELI lasers) - it seems that research institutions can really keep pace in this field.
What you describe is almost right. Yes, laser photons scatter with electrons to generate x-ray photons, but the process is Compton scattering, not harmonics generation. The electrons are laser wakefield-accelerated (i.e. free) electrons of about 55 MeV kinetic energy (yes, capital M) , not valence electrons.
Compton scattering analog would be playing billiard with electrons an photons: You can transfer energy from electrons to photons. In this case you take a fat high-energy (moving) electron and hit that with a low energy laser photon. This transfers a lot of kinetic energy onto the photon making it an x-ray photon, basically.
There are no atoms involved in the primary process, so there is no re-emission and no decay - it's just scattering.
Link to preprint: http://www.unl.edu/diocles/Com...
Diocles laser homepage: http://www.unl.edu/diocles/dio...
From the businesses point of view it's seldom good to be not in control of the sales side of business.
The well-known brands have spent a lot of money to be a well-known brand. In return they expect more customers, especially those who are too lazy to do a proper market research before making a decision (aka "loyal customer").
Travel agencies and booking agents increase market transparency - that's good for the customer, not the businesses. Increased transparency means that customers find the Hotel Noname or recently opened house, or that they can compare all the choices with reasonable effort.
Those aggregators flourish in markets with low transparent, typically markets with so many choices that it's difficult or time-consuming to compare them all, or sometimes even find all available choices.
Having said that, what you suggest is probably what hotels will be left with. It's just that they don't like to hear it.
Ze Germans !
I didn't say that money is a resource, merely replying to your statement implying that there is a shortage of money (as you agree, there isn't).
You are right, if there is a mismatch between goods and money circulating it will lead to inflation or deflation - undesirable at excessive levels - the level of about 1-2% inflation seems to lead to the most stable economy.
By all means, if there is a shortage of goods / services (i.e. the historic examples you cite) do not implement UBI - that would be foolish. However assuming that we have heavily automated production and services there is no shortage of goods - in fact there is overabundance of goods which leads to shortage of labor and decline of prices (what we begin see today). In that case UBI might be a solution that takes away pressure on the labor market (oversupply) and provides more demand. Of course it has to be balanced well with the economic power of the country in question. Obviously, you can't give everybody one million dollar (not today, when we still need doctors and firemen). It has to be a small amount so achievers are still motivated to work but big enough such that people left behind are not totally extracted from the economy (which may collapse the economy).
Since it's difficult to reason what amount exactly is right the Finnish experiment is so important. I think it's a very difficult transition to go from the goods-scarcity economy to the post-scarcity economy. It might be a transition where we fail the first few times we try (i.e. social unrest, dark ages) - but I hope we at least give it our best shot.
decimating the ocean floor
I believe you are referring to trawling fishery. That's a choice we make that we want to eat that much fish and use that technology to catch fish. Doesn't have to be that way.
Global warming - that's presumably related to increased CO2 levels. We can chose to reduce CO2 levels by reducing fossil fuel consumption and switching to other (sustainable) sources / fuels of energy.
Reducing population won't help the cause of pollution reduction because it will trigger economic problems that will make us turn away from sustainable technologies which presently require investment. If anything we have to at least maintain population level to create a stable economic basis.
The true challenge is to bring prosperity to the poor countries which currently have locally unsustainable population growth. This often a political problem though. Increasing prosperity usually leads to slowing down population growth.
There isn't any shortage of resources that I'm aware of. Maybe locally, people are short of certain resources - that's a distribution problem. Globally, we have enough of everything.
Pollution and destruction of environment is a choice that we make (in some countries).
For example, as long as we decide to use combustion engine cars for transport, that's a choice that will result in higher pollution levels compared to electric cars. We don't have to stick to that choice.
Maybe you know a resource that's in short supply globally and cannot be replaced?
Coloring isn't creative.
Come on, that's just a slightly more advanced version of Paint's fill bucket. A task that can be done by anyone with a few simple instructions isn't creative. It's probably boring work that was begging to become automated.
For a better example of computer creativity look here https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...
If anything the graphs you cite actually support Waffle Iron's point: Output grew faster than Compensation in the last couple of years. Increased automation is likely the reason.
The graph doesn't make any statement about unemployment though. Compensation increases due to higher wages for same amount of working hours.
That's fine. Most people get bored of lazing around sooner or later. Maybe you'd create great art. Being immune to peer pressure is a great predisposition to that end. I'm optimistic.
Thanks to the internet today it's easier (and cheaper) than ever before to let people know about your product - you just need to be smart about it.
Just start a blog or a YT channel about pissing in people's mouth and build up the community, you'll succeed eventually if there is indeed a market.
Doesn't mean you are guaranteed to be successful with every stupid idea - you still need a working product and people willing to pay for it.
I'm skeptic about your proposed pissing business. I don't doubt you could achieve satisfactory quality of service but there could be a problem finding people willing to pay.