Actually, following your idea, that would be a very clean way to drill the surface of planets in the quest for water. Think of Mars... Think of Europe, one of Jupiter's moons which is supposed to hide an ocean which could be warmed by the effects of Jupiter's gravity on the satellite and which could hide life. If they can make a powerful yet small source of energy to feed the laser though...
What is it with Slashdotters that most of us know so much about computers, yet still do not read the docs at our disposal ? If you had read the second next post of the thread, you would have seen that I wrote a correction about 2.5 hours before you wrote this and you would have spared the 5 minutes of your time you spent writing about something that is already there...
I mixed things a bit. Skin cancer is not triggered by green house effects; just correlated with the ozone holes. Anyway, the rest of the post about awareness still applies...
I have no hope that there is going to be any action taken before half of the population is dying of skin cancer. The problem is that because the personal interest goes far before the general interest, things like environment are always coming last in the chain of decisions. And people who want to be elected have to show that they care about the issues that personally interest voters (otherwise they just don't get elected, see Nader). I think Bush did mention that he did not believe the green house effect was an issue and taking measures would increase the price of electricity. It is true that we would all be happy if the price of electricity is lower, but if this is at the cost of our future and our children's future, then this is really too expensive. But, I don't believe there is enough awareness for longer term decisions to be made. Anyway, we'll find a cure to skin cancer someday so who cares...?
We will continue to use C++, Java, Perl, and a number of other languages, but Python certainly will have its place.
That's not such a big deal I agree. It only means that for a certain kind of activity they use what they think is the best language. Having Python among these is a small step for Disney, but a big step for the Python community, a good way to be legitimated in any case. Disney has been for some time in the open source business (can I put these words together ?) like with go.com search engine and their Tea language so I'm not surprised that they get into Python now. One potential very good aspect of this proof of interest though is there is now a real chance that some Disney graphists will be kind enough to propose new flashy ideas to replace their crappy logo.
A recent attempt to create a universal language is actually called Earth Language. It borrows basic ideas from ideogram of Chinese characteristics except that it is much simpler and easier to remember. There is even an ASCII version of it.
Hieroglyphs never would had been decrypted if translations in other languages were not available on the Rosetta Stone. Therefore I guess some sort of brute force could be more powerful than a single anti-cryptography process: send your message in ways which call upon different subjective views: drawing, maths formulaes, anti-cryptography, binary, sound, symbols,... just like they did on the Discovery probe 25 years ago. But don't expect any quick feedback!
Or find a way to travel faster than light and get a Babel fish.
Is there any assembly equivalent to thinking ?
on
Anticryptography
·
· Score: 1
Communication is based on a minimal set of common codes. I guess the best way to communicate would be to link thought to thought (thought being the lowest level of conscience, like assembly or hardware is to computer) but that seems far beyond our reach for now unless telepathy exists but that certainly needs further research.
It seems very challenging to me to try to be understood by another civilization without the ability to get feedback. Not only that, but before they are actually given a chance to face the message, they need to share with us the same technologies, which needs a lot of serendipity. Not to mention the fact that they need to exist and to want to communicate with us too.
An excerpt of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide may help understand how hard it can be to communicate when you do not share common references:
"I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said.
"They're not cavemen," said Ford.
"They look like cavemen."
Ford let it pass.
"I see," he said.
"It's uphill work," said Arthur wearily. "The only word they know is grunt and they can't spell it."
Before you make any comment like this, I suggest that you read the post first. Just a friendly remark so that YOU can be taken seriously next time. My point was not to criticize christians, it was to show that the Bible is not a reliable historical source. It's so fuzzy that it allows people to interpret it the way they like. When I say Christians almost burnt Copernic, it was to show that the "science versus religion" war has been there for quite a while, and so far, science has always proved true (the flat earth is just an example, another example could be the creation theory which is in the Bible).
I think I would not hesitate if the interest of the project is good. However, you think that Utah is restrictive ? Look at what happens in Saudi Arabia for all these Microsoft employees! Do you think Linux would be flexible enough to handle these requirements ?
You know what it will end up with ? That will have some impact on the music quality. Big producers will not make as much money as they used to and they will stop producing Spice Girls and Britney Spears. What a loss! More people will start making music for the sake of it and will live on concerts. I'm being intentionally provocative here but it may be one of the side effects if big corporates cannot control the spread of MP3's. But, let's be reealistic, that will not happen.
"Our business is protecting kids. We never would, never have, and never will jeopardize anyone's privacy"
Could there be a way to customize the stop words ? I mean, I agree with the fact that protecting children from unwanted subjects is good. However, I strongly disagree with the dictatorship of those companies/states/people that choose words in the same old range of topics like sex. If some parents have other values than the majority of people, they should be free to ban the topics they want. I've already said that in the past but I don't think sex is a bad thing if you compare it to war stuff.
Let me disagree a little with that view of yours. Though it is true that uninteresting tasks are part of our daily job, it is not the case 100% of our time: there is almost definitely an interesting and teaching side to our jobs. So when a company claims that students are welcome to participate to an engineering project, they should also be given interesting duties on top of the braindead stuff. Otherwise it is no longer a true engineering project.
You have the choice as a student to enjoy your student life and leave the stress matters to later which is fine (otherwise they will regret their student life). But if students are worried because they want to have interesting things to do, then there are plenty of ways. Why not taking part of an open-source project ? Why not working on certifications ? As a recruiter, I always have a much better impression of open source people and certified students because that shows a strong will to learn for the sake of making progress. They are the same people who can work independently, make wise decisions and make a project be successful. Of course that does not pay for your moppet at the end of your internship, but when you start your real professional life, your salary will very likely be 50% more than all your friends because of your experience and the potential that you show. So it's a longer term prospect.
What people call the "Bible" is actually a compilation of 77 old scripts (39 from Jewish and Aramean litterature, 27 from the Greeks written in the first century,...) written by men and objectivity at that time was genuinely not of this world. Why on earth would we believe in the Bible more than say ancient Mesopotamian scripts which said that witchcraft exists ? Also, the 4 canonical Evangils have been chosen by the Church among around 20 long time after they have been written. The remaining evangils have been said to be apocryph. If this is not politics, then I'm the pope!! There is absolutely not a single proof that Jesus as a person existed at all, just like Pythagore or Orpheus. Noone has ever found Moise's tables of Law (whatever you call that in English). The simple fact that most religions (especially Christians) has a long history of disregard and hatred regarding other religions is an enormous clue that Christian god is questionable. That is for me too many facts that show that the scientific way may be more reliable than Christians' way.
If God's way is truth, why has it been so much altered over the years ? Don't forget that Christians almost killed Copernic because he dared saying that earth is round. Christians also said that black people and women had no souls (by the way, could any Christian here draw me a soul ?). They are saying now that man was created 6000 years ago but when they have a scientific conclusion thrown to their face in 100 years from now, they will turn around and say that it is a metaphor or something and they will smile at the ignorance of today's Christians.
In most countries, you can see that the more the people are ignorant (can't read, can't access information, live in extreme poverty,...), the more they are likely to be religious and very faithful. On the contrary, the more the science advances, the more our old conception of God disappears.
I actually believe in some sort of metaphysics, which I update on the basis of scientific discoveries. Science has not yet found any answer to death (nor if there is actually any meaning to that anyway). As long as this gap is not filled, people will shelter in reassuring books, even if they are all but reliable sources. After all, we all like fairy tales stories...
When you get more than 10 people working on the same project, it is very likely that you begin to need some sort of technical manager to keep focused on common objectives. The difference between open source and commercial projects is that open source programmers choose to work on open source projects, and that shows a level of involvement which is not the same for commercial. For small scale projects, you may not need managers but you'd better be damned organized to dispatch the responsibilities among the team. For bigger projects, I'm sorry but even in open source software, there are people who make decisions and who implicitely take the role of a manager. Most programmers (and people in general) are inclined to do the way that is good for them and not the way that is good for the team, especially in bigger structures where there's much more anonymity. Therefore, you have to admit that after a certain scale, you need managers.
A team of investigators combs the Internet for infringing sites, identifies the culprit, then e-mails the evidence to Powell and waits for him to give the word.
Just filter the email addresses or domain names he use to contact people and send it to/dev/null or bounce it back... Enough spam!:))
Also, when I started programming, I often asked stupid questions to good programmers who told me RTFM. I'm not talking about newsgroups, just working environment. A good mentoring practice could have been for example to tell me which manual to read (where to get the info) or to explain the important part of the manual and then tell me that if I want to know more, I should investigate myself. But no! RTFM...
... most of the time. Because there is not one person alone who can build a whole system, you need to do team work and dispatch responsibilities. You need some managers who usually are quite distant with technical realities (deadlines, budgets). You need techies who are quite distant with the real world (what do you need a GUI for ?). You need a nice working environment and what's more you need to communicate. Eventually, you need a customer who knows what he wants and have precise ways to describe what he wants. In addition, get me some heavy competition and so the problems start!
There are already different methodologies to enhance the quality of the work like Rational Unified Process or Extreme Programming which correspond to different project scales. Mentoring is very good if good techies were no so contemptful with junior programmers. None of these techniques will be enough to counterweigh the human factor though. This is why I believe that writing good software all the time is impossible.
Also, it is a complete misconception that good software is only a question of technique! A good software is a software which is widely used and that people are happy with. Customers, programmers, managers and marketing people are people before anything. And this is why I strongly believe that good software is much more a question of people and not of methodologies.
Look, for the biggest majority of the users, Microsoft Office is a very good product. For the geeks community, Linux is a good software. The notion of "good" is sooo variable...:)
What a no-event!! We already have Palm OS with Linux no ?
Someone said recently that he was fed up with people trying to cram Linux into every hardware there is which would be better used as a toaster. He is sooooooo right...
Someone said also that just because people know they can, they don't bother trying to imagine if they should...
When talking about intelligent life, we are fully lost in the haze of subjectivity. What is intelligence ? What is life ? And what is the combination of the two ? Intelligence is relative and this is why some people say that we are an intelligent species. Because we have acquired the capacity to learn how to survive in most environments on earth. Because we seem to be masters of our destiny. Because we have the power of Linux whereas my cat is still using Windows 95. Because we have landed on the moon. This is a blatant superiority of human being over animals. On earth. However, my friend Ford Prefect from another galaxy told me that human beings are totally braindead: on his planet, instead of going to school, they download all their knowledge to their conscience, they are eternal, they travel between dimensions, go back and forth in time and spend most of their time upgrading Beos, they don't reproduce, they are.
In terms of life, why is there a limit between a virus and a bacteria ? Intelligent life is definitely a human concept.
There seems to be a constant though in the universe: it's that its disorder is increasing every day and at the same time, we observe that matter takes more and more complex shapes. If the strings theory is true, at the beginning there were strings which turned into elementary particles, which associated thanks to the strong interaction force, which turned into more complex particles like atoms with their properties which associated into molecules with again very different properties according to their composition, properties like NDA. Eventually some of these particles associated to turn into what we call living organisms. These organisms evoluted into more complex organisms and there we are, in front of our TVs, watching the match, having a Bud, worshipping god, self-claimed intelligent life.
As an analogy for the computer nerds (I've heard there were quite a few here), we have silicium and electricty, then transistors, then hardware, then assembly, then C, then object oriented languages, then visual languages, then XML applications, then...
The universe seems to go in the sense of more abstraction, a process which we call evolution. Note that when you put living beings together, you have micro and macro social behaviours. What is the next level ? Who knows whether some alien species have reached several other levels which we could not even conceive ? Who knows whether water and amino-acids are the only way for matter to restructure itself into a more complex shape ? Who knows whether there are only 4 dimensions, whether the speed of light is the ultimate limit, whether time is only going forwards, whether there is only one time dimension ?
And no please, do not mention god or God or Buddha or Bill Gates or Ronaldo. If such a concept exists, it should be the same for the whole universe no ? What would happen if one day we meet some kind of intelligent conscient blue color who wants to communicate with us ?
Well, I do believe that life sows its seeds chaotically in the whole universe and a few experiments have shown that water, amino-acids and a few temperature, pressure,... conditions (and time) could in some circumstances bring to the kind of life we understand. Therefore if we discover some of these elements in some other distant place, there are more conditions for life to emerge than in vacuum. As far as we are aware. Of course, it is not enough, it does not prove anything. But if we have not made stupid assumptions like that in the past, we would probably be dying of the plague on a flat world fearing that the sky falls on our heads no ?
And who knows, maybe a few messages were sent by some living species at some point and the whole communications were gobbled by a black hole in the center of our galaxy. That's also a probability.
DC-10 (McDonnell-Douglas) : 1000 kg
L-1011 (Lockheed) : 680 kg
B-747 (Boeing) : 850 kg
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reported 430 aircrafts overloaded with DU in December 1999. Overall, there are 380 tons of DU flying every day over our heads. As a comparison, 320 tons of DU were scattered in Irak in 1991 by Warthog planes to destroy tanks, DU which is highly suspected of being the origin of the Gulf war and Balkans syndroms. And that's only within 10 years time! Therefore it is very nice if some scientists have found that the Deinococcus radiodurans can tame nuclear waste in some way but since radioactivity will not be removed using these bacterias, the problem is not solved at all! How do scientists plan to use them at a wider scale anyway ? How could they treat radioactive smoke or dust which is worse for the human being because it can be inhaled ?
When such a plane crashes and the fuel burns, temperature reaches more than 1000 Celsius which is far enough to oxydate DU to microparticles of UO2 or UO3, which can be widespread by the wind and are breathable. Knowing that DU half life is 4.5 billions years, it may be useful to know better how to use bacterias to solve this problem. But I believe we are still a long way far from a practical solution to the radioactive waste treatment. So until then, prevention is better than repression.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to live long enough to learn how not to be feared of death anymore.
Well now Paco Rabanne's last chance to see his predictions come true have vanished in the Pacific. I want my money back for me lucky charms Paco!
Actually, following your idea, that would be a very clean way to drill the surface of planets in the quest for water. Think of Mars... Think of Europe, one of Jupiter's moons which is supposed to hide an ocean which could be warmed by the effects of Jupiter's gravity on the satellite and which could hide life. If they can make a powerful yet small source of energy to feed the laser though...
What is it with Slashdotters that most of us know so much about computers, yet still do not read the docs at our disposal ? If you had read the second next post of the thread, you would have seen that I wrote a correction about 2.5 hours before you wrote this and you would have spared the 5 minutes of your time you spent writing about something that is already there...
I mixed things a bit. Skin cancer is not triggered by green house effects; just correlated with the ozone holes. Anyway, the rest of the post about awareness still applies...
I have no hope that there is going to be any action taken before half of the population is dying of skin cancer. The problem is that because the personal interest goes far before the general interest, things like environment are always coming last in the chain of decisions. And people who want to be elected have to show that they care about the issues that personally interest voters (otherwise they just don't get elected, see Nader). I think Bush did mention that he did not believe the green house effect was an issue and taking measures would increase the price of electricity. It is true that we would all be happy if the price of electricity is lower, but if this is at the cost of our future and our children's future, then this is really too expensive. But, I don't believe there is enough awareness for longer term decisions to be made. Anyway, we'll find a cure to skin cancer someday so who cares...?
We will continue to use C++, Java, Perl, and a number of other languages, but Python certainly will have its place.
That's not such a big deal I agree. It only means that for a certain kind of activity they use what they think is the best language. Having Python among these is a small step for Disney, but a big step for the Python community, a good way to be legitimated in any case. Disney has been for some time in the open source business (can I put these words together ?) like with go.com search engine and their Tea language so I'm not surprised that they get into Python now. One potential very good aspect of this proof of interest though is there is now a real chance that some Disney graphists will be kind enough to propose new flashy ideas to replace their crappy logo.
When I first read the title, I thought it was something sexual about a Large Chunky D* but no it's only a screen... Much better this way!
A recent attempt to create a universal language is actually called Earth Language. It borrows basic ideas from ideogram of Chinese characteristics except that it is much simpler and easier to remember. There is even an ASCII version of it.
Hieroglyphs never would had been decrypted if translations in other languages were not available on the Rosetta Stone. Therefore I guess some sort of brute force could be more powerful than a single anti-cryptography process: send your message in ways which call upon different subjective views: drawing, maths formulaes, anti-cryptography, binary, sound, symbols, ... just like they did on the Discovery probe 25 years ago. But don't expect any quick feedback!
Or find a way to travel faster than light and get a Babel fish.
Communication is based on a minimal set of common codes. I guess the best way to communicate would be to link thought to thought (thought being the lowest level of conscience, like assembly or hardware is to computer) but that seems far beyond our reach for now unless telepathy exists but that certainly needs further research.
It seems very challenging to me to try to be understood by another civilization without the ability to get feedback. Not only that, but before they are actually given a chance to face the message, they need to share with us the same technologies, which needs a lot of serendipity. Not to mention the fact that they need to exist and to want to communicate with us too.
An excerpt of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide may help understand how hard it can be to communicate when you do not share common references:
"I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said. "They're not cavemen," said Ford. "They look like cavemen." Ford let it pass. "I see," he said. "It's uphill work," said Arthur wearily. "The only word they know is grunt and they can't spell it."
Before you make any comment like this, I suggest that you read the post first. Just a friendly remark so that YOU can be taken seriously next time. My point was not to criticize christians, it was to show that the Bible is not a reliable historical source. It's so fuzzy that it allows people to interpret it the way they like. When I say Christians almost burnt Copernic, it was to show that the "science versus religion" war has been there for quite a while, and so far, science has always proved true (the flat earth is just an example, another example could be the creation theory which is in the Bible).
I think I would not hesitate if the interest of the project is good. However, you think that Utah is restrictive ? Look at what happens in Saudi Arabia for all these Microsoft employees! Do you think Linux would be flexible enough to handle these requirements ?
You know what it will end up with ? That will have some impact on the music quality. Big producers will not make as much money as they used to and they will stop producing Spice Girls and Britney Spears. What a loss! More people will start making music for the sake of it and will live on concerts. I'm being intentionally provocative here but it may be one of the side effects if big corporates cannot control the spread of MP3's. But, let's be reealistic, that will not happen.
"Our business is protecting kids. We never would, never have, and never will jeopardize anyone's privacy"
Could there be a way to customize the stop words ? I mean, I agree with the fact that protecting children from unwanted subjects is good. However, I strongly disagree with the dictatorship of those companies/states/people that choose words in the same old range of topics like sex. If some parents have other values than the majority of people, they should be free to ban the topics they want. I've already said that in the past but I don't think sex is a bad thing if you compare it to war stuff.
Let me disagree a little with that view of yours. Though it is true that uninteresting tasks are part of our daily job, it is not the case 100% of our time: there is almost definitely an interesting and teaching side to our jobs. So when a company claims that students are welcome to participate to an engineering project, they should also be given interesting duties on top of the braindead stuff. Otherwise it is no longer a true engineering project.
You have the choice as a student to enjoy your student life and leave the stress matters to later which is fine (otherwise they will regret their student life). But if students are worried because they want to have interesting things to do, then there are plenty of ways. Why not taking part of an open-source project ? Why not working on certifications ? As a recruiter, I always have a much better impression of open source people and certified students because that shows a strong will to learn for the sake of making progress. They are the same people who can work independently, make wise decisions and make a project be successful. Of course that does not pay for your moppet at the end of your internship, but when you start your real professional life, your salary will very likely be 50% more than all your friends because of your experience and the potential that you show. So it's a longer term prospect.
What people call the "Bible" is actually a compilation of 77 old scripts (39 from Jewish and Aramean litterature, 27 from the Greeks written in the first century, ...) written by men and objectivity at that time was genuinely not of this world. Why on earth would we believe in the Bible more than say ancient Mesopotamian scripts which said that witchcraft exists ? Also, the 4 canonical Evangils have been chosen by the Church among around 20 long time after they have been written. The remaining evangils have been said to be apocryph. If this is not politics, then I'm the pope!! There is absolutely not a single proof that Jesus as a person existed at all, just like Pythagore or Orpheus. Noone has ever found Moise's tables of Law (whatever you call that in English). The simple fact that most religions (especially Christians) has a long history of disregard and hatred regarding other religions is an enormous clue that Christian god is questionable. That is for me too many facts that show that the scientific way may be more reliable than Christians' way.
...), the more they are likely to be religious and very faithful. On the contrary, the more the science advances, the more our old conception of God disappears.
If God's way is truth, why has it been so much altered over the years ? Don't forget that Christians almost killed Copernic because he dared saying that earth is round. Christians also said that black people and women had no souls (by the way, could any Christian here draw me a soul ?). They are saying now that man was created 6000 years ago but when they have a scientific conclusion thrown to their face in 100 years from now, they will turn around and say that it is a metaphor or something and they will smile at the ignorance of today's Christians.
In most countries, you can see that the more the people are ignorant (can't read, can't access information, live in extreme poverty,
I actually believe in some sort of metaphysics, which I update on the basis of scientific discoveries. Science has not yet found any answer to death (nor if there is actually any meaning to that anyway). As long as this gap is not filled, people will shelter in reassuring books, even if they are all but reliable sources. After all, we all like fairy tales stories...
When you get more than 10 people working on the same project, it is very likely that you begin to need some sort of technical manager to keep focused on common objectives. The difference between open source and commercial projects is that open source programmers choose to work on open source projects, and that shows a level of involvement which is not the same for commercial. For small scale projects, you may not need managers but you'd better be damned organized to dispatch the responsibilities among the team. For bigger projects, I'm sorry but even in open source software, there are people who make decisions and who implicitely take the role of a manager. Most programmers (and people in general) are inclined to do the way that is good for them and not the way that is good for the team, especially in bigger structures where there's much more anonymity. Therefore, you have to admit that after a certain scale, you need managers.
A team of investigators combs the Internet for infringing sites, identifies the culprit, then e-mails the evidence to Powell and waits for him to give the word.
/dev/null or bounce it back... Enough spam! :))
Just filter the email addresses or domain names he use to contact people and send it to
Also, when I started programming, I often asked stupid questions to good programmers who told me RTFM. I'm not talking about newsgroups, just working environment. A good mentoring practice could have been for example to tell me which manual to read (where to get the info) or to explain the important part of the manual and then tell me that if I want to know more, I should investigate myself. But no! RTFM...
... most of the time. Because there is not one person alone who can build a whole system, you need to do team work and dispatch responsibilities. You need some managers who usually are quite distant with technical realities (deadlines, budgets). You need techies who are quite distant with the real world (what do you need a GUI for ?). You need a nice working environment and what's more you need to communicate. Eventually, you need a customer who knows what he wants and have precise ways to describe what he wants. In addition, get me some heavy competition and so the problems start!
:)
There are already different methodologies to enhance the quality of the work like Rational Unified Process or Extreme Programming which correspond to different project scales. Mentoring is very good if good techies were no so contemptful with junior programmers. None of these techniques will be enough to counterweigh the human factor though. This is why I believe that writing good software all the time is impossible.
Also, it is a complete misconception that good software is only a question of technique! A good software is a software which is widely used and that people are happy with. Customers, programmers, managers and marketing people are people before anything. And this is why I strongly believe that good software is much more a question of people and not of methodologies.
Look, for the biggest majority of the users, Microsoft Office is a very good product. For the geeks community, Linux is a good software. The notion of "good" is sooo variable...
What a no-event!! We already have Palm OS with Linux no ?
Someone said recently that he was fed up with people trying to cram Linux into every hardware there is which would be better used as a toaster. He is sooooooo right...
Someone said also that just because people know they can, they don't bother trying to imagine if they should...
When talking about intelligent life, we are fully lost in the haze of subjectivity. What is intelligence ? What is life ? And what is the combination of the two ? Intelligence is relative and this is why some people say that we are an intelligent species. Because we have acquired the capacity to learn how to survive in most environments on earth. Because we seem to be masters of our destiny. Because we have the power of Linux whereas my cat is still using Windows 95. Because we have landed on the moon. This is a blatant superiority of human being over animals. On earth. However, my friend Ford Prefect from another galaxy told me that human beings are totally braindead: on his planet, instead of going to school, they download all their knowledge to their conscience, they are eternal, they travel between dimensions, go back and forth in time and spend most of their time upgrading Beos, they don't reproduce, they are.
...
... conditions (and time) could in some circumstances bring to the kind of life we understand. Therefore if we discover some of these elements in some other distant place, there are more conditions for life to emerge than in vacuum. As far as we are aware. Of course, it is not enough, it does not prove anything. But if we have not made stupid assumptions like that in the past, we would probably be dying of the plague on a flat world fearing that the sky falls on our heads no ?
In terms of life, why is there a limit between a virus and a bacteria ? Intelligent life is definitely a human concept. There seems to be a constant though in the universe: it's that its disorder is increasing every day and at the same time, we observe that matter takes more and more complex shapes. If the strings theory is true, at the beginning there were strings which turned into elementary particles, which associated thanks to the strong interaction force, which turned into more complex particles like atoms with their properties which associated into molecules with again very different properties according to their composition, properties like NDA. Eventually some of these particles associated to turn into what we call living organisms. These organisms evoluted into more complex organisms and there we are, in front of our TVs, watching the match, having a Bud, worshipping god, self-claimed intelligent life.
As an analogy for the computer nerds (I've heard there were quite a few here), we have silicium and electricty, then transistors, then hardware, then assembly, then C, then object oriented languages, then visual languages, then XML applications, then
The universe seems to go in the sense of more abstraction, a process which we call evolution. Note that when you put living beings together, you have micro and macro social behaviours. What is the next level ? Who knows whether some alien species have reached several other levels which we could not even conceive ? Who knows whether water and amino-acids are the only way for matter to restructure itself into a more complex shape ? Who knows whether there are only 4 dimensions, whether the speed of light is the ultimate limit, whether time is only going forwards, whether there is only one time dimension ?
And no please, do not mention god or God or Buddha or Bill Gates or Ronaldo. If such a concept exists, it should be the same for the whole universe no ? What would happen if one day we meet some kind of intelligent conscient blue color who wants to communicate with us ?
Well, I do believe that life sows its seeds chaotically in the whole universe and a few experiments have shown that water, amino-acids and a few temperature, pressure,
And who knows, maybe a few messages were sent by some living species at some point and the whole communications were gobbled by a black hole in the center of our galaxy. That's also a probability.
Wouldn't it have anything to do with that ?
Use of Depleted Uranium counterweights
DC-10 (McDonnell-Douglas) : 1000 kg
L-1011 (Lockheed) : 680 kg
B-747 (Boeing) : 850 kg
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reported 430 aircrafts overloaded with DU in December 1999. Overall, there are 380 tons of DU flying every day over our heads. As a comparison, 320 tons of DU were scattered in Irak in 1991 by Warthog planes to destroy tanks, DU which is highly suspected of being the origin of the Gulf war and Balkans syndroms. And that's only within 10 years time! Therefore it is very nice if some scientists have found that the Deinococcus radiodurans can tame nuclear waste in some way but since radioactivity will not be removed using these bacterias, the problem is not solved at all! How do scientists plan to use them at a wider scale anyway ? How could they treat radioactive smoke or dust which is worse for the human being because it can be inhaled ?
When such a plane crashes and the fuel burns, temperature reaches more than 1000 Celsius which is far enough to oxydate DU to microparticles of UO2 or UO3, which can be widespread by the wind and are breathable. Knowing that DU half life is 4.5 billions years, it may be useful to know better how to use bacterias to solve this problem. But I believe we are still a long way far from a practical solution to the radioactive waste treatment. So until then, prevention is better than repression.