You're not getting that in the air with a conventional rocket. The payload capacity of the space shuttle was 24.3 tonnes. 8,000,000 / 24.3 = ~329,218 launches. With 135 launches in 30 years that gives us an average of 4 per year into our total number of launches required would mean this project would take 82,304 years just to get the necessary tonnage into orbit.
Nuclear fallout was necessarily part of the plan but they at least presented a few ideas for minimizing this such as adding 'filler' to the bombs that would serve the dual purpose of transmitting the explosive force to the pusher plate and absorbing large amounts of the radiation. As it stands, it's probably the only feasible way we could get that much tonnage into space with current technology. The only forseeable methods to beat this would be some type of space elevator or electromagnetic launch system.
The only conceivable scenario where we could actually make use of such a propulsion system would be if we had so irreparably damaged the earth that there was no chance of human survival and we had also failed to advance any other propulsion technologies. Oddly enough, many would argue that that's exactly the course we're on.
You're right about the key being the harnessing of better propulsion systems. However, we can easily achieve interstellar travel at relativistic speeds once we are capable of producing the necessary thrust and we can even do it at a comfortable 9.8m/s^2 acceleration. Once we're travelling at near light speed the time dilation effects would further shorten the journey for those aboard. A good article on the subject can be found here. A journey of 20.5 light years would only seem to take 6.1 years for those on board rather than the 22.4 years for observers on Earth. There are 135 stars within 20ly, 7 of which are Sun-like. The big issue here isn't our physiology, but our propulsion technology.
Also, it's not dipped. You're thinking of electroplating or a chrome finish. Stainless steel is an alloy of steel and chromium with either nickel or manganese added.
Hold on a second there, Surface doesn't work the same way as these other projects. Only the original used actual cameras and they weren't tracking objects by depth but were registering contacts on the touch surface by measuring the IR contrast they created. The screen itself in the production models integrates a high def display with the IR backlight and the IR sensors so that it can be about the thickness of a table and you don't need a projection gap on the front or back. You also have the fact that the whole unit is meant to act as a device for storing and editing large amounts of information and not just as a UI, it's also in no way meant to be portable. Any of these differences are significant enough to say these projects are not the same technology. It's like you're comparing a desktop PC to an iPod and saying the desktop is copying the iPod. Oh yeah, and did I mention development on Surface started back in 2001? [1]
It's the frikkin time machine from Back to the Future! Everybody that saw that movie as a kid wanted one and probably still does. The gull wing doors just add to the high tech appeal as do the sharp lines and stainless steel body.
Stainless steel at sheet metal thickness is basically just nickel.
Maybe you're thinking of a stainless steel finish? I'm pretty sure that nickel content in stainless doesn't usually go above 10%
Ok, put a rifle and a panther in a cage together and see who wins. Better yet, put a human sans tools and a panther in the wilderness and see who wins. Spoilers: the panther wins. The point is that it takes a social support network of dozens if not hundreds of people and their accumulated knowledge to produce one rifle and only one large cat to rip your face off. Without our society and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge we're just another bag of meat.
Once we start mucking around on nature's home turf, we're seriously outmatched. Consider that we're just learning to put bits together that can reproduce their own instructions, never mind an entire cell. Prokaryotic life has been at it for 3.5 billion years and has produced organisms that will happily munch on both organic and inorganic compounds. The variety of species or OTU (operation taxonomic units) of prokaryotes is so astronomically large that many microbiologists would conclude that given our current methodologies for culturing them and sequencing their genomes it is not currently possible to say how many in total they may be . Some estimates of the number of OTUs in sampled soil have ranged anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 or up to 500,000 [1]. The sheer mass of prokaryotic life has been estimated to be as high as 5.46 x 10^14 Kg [2].
In short, whatever we think we might be capable of doing in the near future chances are that life has already accomplished it millions of years ago. So if you're looking for bionukes you don't have to go any further than your back garden.
The idea of entropy is not so much related to the instantaneous location of elements within a system but in the change in location (distribution) over the course of time. More importantly it is concerned with the availability of energy within the system to do work. If we take your example of scattered stones and apply what we've said, we can see that the system would have low entropy if you placed the stones in such a way that they form a desired structure, say the wall of a house for instance. The wall performs work by doing things such as holding up a roof or keeping the wind out. The entropy of our wall system will increase over time as the stones are moved from their original positions by natural forces. This weakens the ability of the wall to do the work it was designed for. If enough of the stones move far enough then the wall loses it's ability to act as a wall and will collapse.
I believe he was taking issue with you saing that everything is entropy, not that systems tend towards entropy. Using your second assertion 'the world is round'; if we put your first assertion into the same terms, it is as if you said 'everything is round' rather than 'matter tends towards roundness'.
Would you be willing to see your taxes double to pay for it? Would you be willing to give up one of the big government expenses/entitlements (Social Security, the military, Medicare) and funnel that money to NASA?
Parental Advisory: May contain scenes of explicit hyperbole, nonsense and rectally derived figures, discretion is advised.
They want to stop kids from being publicly humiliated in high school? Good luck. The point of the program was to use the only effective stick they have in public school nowadays, peer pressure, and for a good cause in this case. I'm sure none of these kids are going to regret working at McDonald's for the rest of their life as long as it saves them a little embarrasment at school. Nut up California.
It NEVER has anything to do with saving electricity.
Seriously? That's practically the only reason I ever shut my computers off and the only answer I've ever gotten from people when I've bothered to ask. You must either have some really paranoid friends or not know that many IT people. If I left all the hardware in my house powered up all the time it would cost me a fortune in bills, not to mention it's decidedly bad for the electrical grid and the ecosystem.
I would sleep quite well, only cowards kill people in their sleep. I'm sad to hear that you're dragging yourself through the mal du siècle, hopefully you'll grow out of it someday.
That is exactly the type of corporate centralism which has been flourishing in the U.S. for the past decade (though you can see it's roots going much deeper). The frightening thing is that the groups responsible for establishing the 'legality' of these martinet policies have also been attempting to push them into other countries, replacing their decidedly more liberal laws with their own. If this seems familiar, it's because these are the same cold war era tactics that have been going on for the past century. The same ones that were supposed to have stopped back in 1991. What's frightening about this type of action isn't so much that it is still happening, since it never really stopped, but who is perpetuating it. Namely, the companies that profit by holding the keys to an intellectual monopoly or the tools to extort money from others by claiming 'rights' of ownership over the other's products.
No longer does this insanity take place in the rarified atmosphere of internation politics. Now, with the RIAA and then MPAA[1][2] lawsuits and the recent incident of a patent troll going after small businesses, this sort of thing is quite literally at your doorstep.
On a political level, both local and national, this plays out as aggravation of class struggle with McCarthyism and the "you're either with us or against us" mindset. On the streets, we've got good old fashioned union busting (carried out by our police forces no less). The political pundits in America are right about one thing, like the Communists and National-Socialists before, there are fascists/communists/terrorists in your midst but they aren't who you think they are.
From what you've said it's clear that you don't really understand the concept of honor. Sadly, not many people do these days. Honor isn't about masculinity, fate or proving yourself. The concept behind it is to act in accordance with the mutually agreed upon norms and morality of the society in which you live. In modern society, killing a person for any reason other than the exceptional case of self-defense is highly illegal and rightly so. I honestly hope that your view of 'necessary' killing is the impotent posturing it appears to be.
You are right when you say that civility and honor come with settling differences without resorting to violence and the reason that is perceived as honorable is that it demonstrates one's ability to work within the confines of behavior laid out by your society. Stabbing someone in the back, in both a literal and figurative sense is the definition of cowardice because you not only go against the morality of your culture, you also shame any reason you may have to justify an assault on another person by showing that you yourself won't even give it the merit of contest.
The simple fact of the matter is that humans are social animals, and therefore find social interaction very intellectually stimulating. That is not a controversial statement.
While we're poking at each other for over generalizations, it might be wise not to make any without evidence. I said some people have difficulty learning in social environments and some people thrive in them, I wasn't pulling figures out of my ass or making blanket statements about the entire human race. If you even dip a toe into the theory of human interaction you'll discover that you can't paint everyone the same colour when it comes to individual learning behavior and especially not when dealing with individual learning within a group. The most basic things that are going to fly out at you are people with mild to moderate social phobias 6.8% and anxiety disorders 3.1%, people with learning disabilities such as Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, or other information processing disorders 15%, the biggest group is going to be people with an introvert personality type or mixed introvert-extrovert type depending on how they relate to group activity and are going to account for a good 50.7% of the population (Source: Myers, I. B., McCaulley, M. H., Quenk, N. L., & Hammer, A. L. (1998). MBTI Manual: A guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (3rd ed.). Palo Alto,CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. )
My point is that learning institutions need to provide options for people who have different learning styles and needs. Methods of education should not be based solely on tradition or the individual experience of certain people, be they administratiors, lecturers or students. It is a shame that people and even our colleges and universities are trying to push back against these alternative learning tools when what they need to do is embrace and improve them. I would be the last to argue that these methods don't need a lot of further development to reach their full potential but we need hands on experience to get there. If history has shown us anything, you can't stuff the genie back in the bottle once he's out.
Hence, an excellent reason to look for life where there is water. It is a known fact that life on Earth requires the presence of water and even though it is the only form of life we have observed, it's still observable evidence.
"panspermia causes all life"
Nope, sorry, not a 'classic' argument among the scientific community. An interesting hypothesis but it has no evidence to back it up.
"we know what we're looking for when looking at life like ours"
This is my biggest point of contention with your argument. I agree that we could make an attempt to look for life that is fundamentally different from us on the molecular level even though we would have to make huge assumptions about what to look for and would be left with not even the faintest idea of where to start. Even if we make all these leaps of faith and somehow find the time and resources to devote to it and then win the galactic lottery and find some form of non-carbon based, intelligent life, how would we even go about interacting with it? Such a life form would be so deeply different from us that even with our astronomical luck so far, the chances of its intelligence being remotely compatible with our own would be, for all practical purposes, 0%.
Carbon based extraterrestrial life is going to be weird enough as it is if we ever find any, we don't need to complicate the matter more by trying to commune with space rocks or gaseous clouds.
Where the heck do you kids get these ideas from. There is no known living thing on Earth that can function without the presence of water. There is a possibility that some form of life could be built around a different molecule but that's all just theory and conjecture until it's observed.
There are over 500 G type stars within 100 ly. According to this study, about 170 would have potentially habitable planets orbiting them. The point is not that we should attempt to travel to these planets, barring a fundamental rewrite of the laws of physics or an unfathomable leap in technology, we won't be going there any time soon. The key is these worlds may support intelligent life, life capable of communication, communication that may be established within 200 years at the outside maximum. A dozen of these stars are within 20 to 30 ly where we could see communication within a lifetime. The odds that intelligent life capable of radio communication exists on any life bearing planet may be slim but if it does, the odds that that life is far in advance of us in terms of age and possibly technological ability as well are orders of magnitude larger.
Remember, we are still on the leading edge of our scientific advances. Radio communication has only been known about for a little over 130 years, not only does this mean that we are still in our infancy but that our earliest communications may now just be garnering a response. Now more than ever we need to dedicate more attention to our local stellar neighborhood. All promising, near-by stars should be, at the least, monitored continuously and ideally we should be transmitting focused signals as well.
Given how much more we have learned about the structure of our galaxy and the stars that compose it over the last decade we can no longer ignore the sky above our heads. We have already seen the shores of the New World, an ocean may stand between us but men have cast their dreams upon the open waters before and we shall do so again.
Whoah nelly, I think you need to reel that in and pour a little fact juice on it before you go all L. Ron on us.
First, distances my friend. 1,000 ly is way over the top for this thought experiment. You probably want to start with something a little more manageable, somewhere around 100 ly. The reason is that once you get up around 1,000 ly you're already dealing with millions of stars and, as it happens, that's about the average thickness of our galaxy. With 100 ly we're down to a more manageable 3,500 stars, about 500 of which are G type (our Sun's range).
Second, this isn't the 17th centrury. The most effective way to communicate with an alien race is not going to be a heliograph. Sure, if you wanted to be over-the-top-even-a-backyard-kid-with-a-telescope-can-see-you we could build a satellite the size of Jupiter and blot out our sun in irregular patterns. Might be good for a bit of a laugh, we could send them Yo Momma So Fat jokes in Morse code (can you imagine the looks on their faces when they figured that one out? Hah!). If you really wanted to stick with optical communication it would be far simpler to just build a big fat space laser, the light would be much more coherent and we'd have greater bandwidth for the transmission since we could more easily modulate the light. Sticking with reality though, it's a million times easier to build large radio transmitters. After all, it's something we're already really good at and the requirements for power and location are more trivial to obtain. A massive, artificial radio source is going to be just as noticeable as a blinking star if not more so.
Third, we don't want to talk to the new kids on the block. I'll put this simply, if they are just about as advanced as we were 500 years ago then we can't help them anyways. Imagine if Galileo Galilei had received a message from the stars in 1610! Making the huge leap that he might be able to record the message let alone decode it (maybe it was just a Yo Momma joke), what on Earth is he going to do with it? 'Oh hey Pope Urban, guess what? The Earth revolves around the Sun aaaaand there's life on other planets.' 'Yes I'm sure, they sent a message about your mother...' Fact is, we only want to talk to them if they're actually going to understand the concept of communicating with an entirely different life form. We, as a civilization, are not even at that point.
In conclusion, dream on RicktheBrick, dream on. Just make sure you've got some knowledge to put behind those dreams and maybe one day venetian blinds in outer space will be a reality, if only to make fun of more primitive alien societies.
Since that question is impossible to answer and skates around the original intent of the question which was proposing something more akin to the 'Ship of Theseus' I think I'll take a stab at it, although the answer is relatively obvious.
First, let me ask: are you the same person you were when you were 5? Do you even remember being 5? Can you tell me the reasoning behind decisions you made back then or give me an example of your thoughts and emotions throughout an average day at that age? Most people only have a hazy recollection of the early period of their life and the generally accepted reason is that the human brain does not fully finish developing until the early twenties. You are most likely a drastically different person now then when you were 5, 10 or even 17, you make different choices, feel differently about life, family and friends and have different goals and priorities. So were you the same person at that age? Generally, you would say yes but you've developed or 'grown up' since then. The fact is, we are in a constant state of change with regard to the brain, sometimes on a large physical scale with the maturation of different regions of the brain over time and sometimes on a minute level with the formation of new connections between individual neurons and the creation of new pathways of neural activity throughout the brain.
Do these changes change the way we behave? Yes, most certainly. Do these changes fundamentally alter who we are? That's a tricky one! As for how we feel about the matter, we would like to believe so and we deny that it happens. Someone can 'turn over a new leaf', right? They can 'grow up' or 'see the light' or 'make a new start'? But you are still you from day to day and year to year. You don't die every time you go to sleep and are remade anew when you wake in the morning. You still exist as a person even if you hold fundamentally different convictions and beliefs than you did in the past. Then who is this 'you' anyway? How can we, like Theseus' ship, replace each tiny part of your body over the years and still call you the same person? Maybe you are just the parts that don't change. Just a big bag of semi-permanent neurons wiring themselves up in different ways to make you dance and speak.
If we are truly just the deterministic result of our biological circuitry, then we have nothing to worry about when replacing parts of it. If it functions in exactly the same manner as the previous stuff, then we continue on as usual without even noticing a change. However, if there is something a little more subtle than neuro-chemical signals going on in there we might be looking at the potential for something else. To dig up and beat a long dead horse, if our consciousness is actually moreso the software running on top of the hardware rather than just an incredibly complex collection of pre-wired circuits, we now have the potential that our consciousness can change at a fundamental level. We are no longer shackled to the circuits we were born with but have the possibility of changing every detail of ourselves with sufficient knowledge.
As for how it all works, I believe we're somewhere in the middle. A mixture of physical neural circuits that respond to stimuli in a pre-determined manner, neural activity that mimics the behaviour of a set circuit but is subject to change over time, and more dynamic activity that feeds back on itself enough that it can make changes on the fly and display more emergent behavior.
TL;DR - parts of us are permanent but it doesn't matter if they're replace as long as they work the same, other parts change gradually anyways and so if they are changed over time it doesn't make you not 'you', the bits left over that make us act so uniquely human probably can't be replaced with hardware (or even current software for that matter) simply because we don't really know what they are or how they work. You might accidentally kill th
Now Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues have created a synthetic cerebellum which can receive sensory inputs from the brainstem - a region that acts as a conduit for neuronal information from the rest of the body. Their device can interpret these inputs, and send a signal to a different region of the brainstem that prompts motor neurons to execute the appropriate movement.
They are actually targeting the region of the brain responsible for motor learning (physical movement as a response to external stimuli) which is colloquially called 'muscle memory'. So yes, this rat does know Kung Fu.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'most people'. Some people will have a harder time learning from just the lecture, textbook and office hours / labs. That proportion of people is likely to be similair to the number of people that have difficulty learning in an environment where there are distractions such as other people talking amongst themselves while the lecture is ongoing. The strategy that is usually arrived at to overcome this, in the second case, is to make better use of the textbook and the professor during office hours; in the first case, I would imagine it would be to speak with other people attending the same course... after lecture.
If you are taking a properly designed online course then there will be resources (such as online chat, forums, and email addresses of faculty) provided for you so that you may get in contact with the professors and other students. If you do not know how to use these resources, then maybe you should not be taking the online version of the course. If these resources weren't provided, there may be an issue with the institution's method of making it's course material available online. Possibly: A) the material is not meant as a substitute for the entire course or B) they did a crap job and need to fix it, which is the point of TFA.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not getting that in the air with a conventional rocket. The payload capacity of the space shuttle was 24.3 tonnes. 8,000,000 / 24.3 = ~329,218 launches. With 135 launches in 30 years that gives us an average of 4 per year into our total number of launches required would mean this project would take 82,304 years just to get the necessary tonnage into orbit.
Nuclear fallout was necessarily part of the plan but they at least presented a few ideas for minimizing this such as adding 'filler' to the bombs that would serve the dual purpose of transmitting the explosive force to the pusher plate and absorbing large amounts of the radiation. As it stands, it's probably the only feasible way we could get that much tonnage into space with current technology. The only forseeable methods to beat this would be some type of space elevator or electromagnetic launch system.
The only conceivable scenario where we could actually make use of such a propulsion system would be if we had so irreparably damaged the earth that there was no chance of human survival and we had also failed to advance any other propulsion technologies. Oddly enough, many would argue that that's exactly the course we're on.
You're right about the key being the harnessing of better propulsion systems. However, we can easily achieve interstellar travel at relativistic speeds once we are capable of producing the necessary thrust and we can even do it at a comfortable 9.8m/s^2 acceleration. Once we're travelling at near light speed the time dilation effects would further shorten the journey for those aboard. A good article on the subject can be found here. A journey of 20.5 light years would only seem to take 6.1 years for those on board rather than the 22.4 years for observers on Earth. There are 135 stars within 20ly, 7 of which are Sun-like. The big issue here isn't our physiology, but our propulsion technology.
Also, it's not dipped. You're thinking of electroplating or a chrome finish. Stainless steel is an alloy of steel and chromium with either nickel or manganese added.
Hold on a second there, Surface doesn't work the same way as these other projects. Only the original used actual cameras and they weren't tracking objects by depth but were registering contacts on the touch surface by measuring the IR contrast they created. The screen itself in the production models integrates a high def display with the IR backlight and the IR sensors so that it can be about the thickness of a table and you don't need a projection gap on the front or back. You also have the fact that the whole unit is meant to act as a device for storing and editing large amounts of information and not just as a UI, it's also in no way meant to be portable. Any of these differences are significant enough to say these projects are not the same technology. It's like you're comparing a desktop PC to an iPod and saying the desktop is copying the iPod. Oh yeah, and did I mention development on Surface started back in 2001? [1]
Maybe you're thinking of a stainless steel finish? I'm pretty sure that nickel content in stainless doesn't usually go above 10%
Ok, put a rifle and a panther in a cage together and see who wins. Better yet, put a human sans tools and a panther in the wilderness and see who wins. Spoilers: the panther wins. The point is that it takes a social support network of dozens if not hundreds of people and their accumulated knowledge to produce one rifle and only one large cat to rip your face off. Without our society and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge we're just another bag of meat.
Once we start mucking around on nature's home turf, we're seriously outmatched. Consider that we're just learning to put bits together that can reproduce their own instructions, never mind an entire cell. Prokaryotic life has been at it for 3.5 billion years and has produced organisms that will happily munch on both organic and inorganic compounds. The variety of species or OTU (operation taxonomic units) of prokaryotes is so astronomically large that many microbiologists would conclude that given our current methodologies for culturing them and sequencing their genomes it is not currently possible to say how many in total they may be . Some estimates of the number of OTUs in sampled soil have ranged anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 or up to 500,000 [1]. The sheer mass of prokaryotic life has been estimated to be as high as 5.46 x 10^14 Kg [2].
In short, whatever we think we might be capable of doing in the near future chances are that life has already accomplished it millions of years ago. So if you're looking for bionukes you don't have to go any further than your back garden.
There we go, now it's a real /. comment.
Also: Did you just cite Jurassic Park?
The idea of entropy is not so much related to the instantaneous location of elements within a system but in the change in location (distribution) over the course of time. More importantly it is concerned with the availability of energy within the system to do work. If we take your example of scattered stones and apply what we've said, we can see that the system would have low entropy if you placed the stones in such a way that they form a desired structure, say the wall of a house for instance. The wall performs work by doing things such as holding up a roof or keeping the wind out. The entropy of our wall system will increase over time as the stones are moved from their original positions by natural forces. This weakens the ability of the wall to do the work it was designed for. If enough of the stones move far enough then the wall loses it's ability to act as a wall and will collapse.
I believe he was taking issue with you saing that everything is entropy, not that systems tend towards entropy. Using your second assertion 'the world is round'; if we put your first assertion into the same terms, it is as if you said 'everything is round' rather than 'matter tends towards roundness'.
Parental Advisory: May contain scenes of explicit hyperbole, nonsense and rectally derived figures, discretion is advised.
They want to stop kids from being publicly humiliated in high school? Good luck. The point of the program was to use the only effective stick they have in public school nowadays, peer pressure, and for a good cause in this case. I'm sure none of these kids are going to regret working at McDonald's for the rest of their life as long as it saves them a little embarrasment at school. Nut up California.
Fer someone from Ohio, you sure do talk funny.
Seriously? That's practically the only reason I ever shut my computers off and the only answer I've ever gotten from people when I've bothered to ask. You must either have some really paranoid friends or not know that many IT people. If I left all the hardware in my house powered up all the time it would cost me a fortune in bills, not to mention it's decidedly bad for the electrical grid and the ecosystem.
I would sleep quite well, only cowards kill people in their sleep. I'm sad to hear that you're dragging yourself through the mal du siècle, hopefully you'll grow out of it someday.
That is exactly the type of corporate centralism which has been flourishing in the U.S. for the past decade (though you can see it's roots going much deeper). The frightening thing is that the groups responsible for establishing the 'legality' of these martinet policies have also been attempting to push them into other countries, replacing their decidedly more liberal laws with their own. If this seems familiar, it's because these are the same cold war era tactics that have been going on for the past century. The same ones that were supposed to have stopped back in 1991. What's frightening about this type of action isn't so much that it is still happening, since it never really stopped, but who is perpetuating it. Namely, the companies that profit by holding the keys to an intellectual monopoly or the tools to extort money from others by claiming 'rights' of ownership over the other's products.
/Godwinned in 3
No longer does this insanity take place in the rarified atmosphere of internation politics. Now, with the RIAA and then MPAA[1] [2] lawsuits and the recent incident of a patent troll going after small businesses, this sort of thing is quite literally at your doorstep.
On a political level, both local and national, this plays out as aggravation of class struggle with McCarthyism and the "you're either with us or against us" mindset. On the streets, we've got good old fashioned union busting (carried out by our police forces no less). The political pundits in America are right about one thing, like the Communists and National-Socialists before, there are fascists/communists/terrorists in your midst but they aren't who you think they are.
From what you've said it's clear that you don't really understand the concept of honor. Sadly, not many people do these days. Honor isn't about masculinity, fate or proving yourself. The concept behind it is to act in accordance with the mutually agreed upon norms and morality of the society in which you live. In modern society, killing a person for any reason other than the exceptional case of self-defense is highly illegal and rightly so. I honestly hope that your view of 'necessary' killing is the impotent posturing it appears to be.
You are right when you say that civility and honor come with settling differences without resorting to violence and the reason that is perceived as honorable is that it demonstrates one's ability to work within the confines of behavior laid out by your society. Stabbing someone in the back, in both a literal and figurative sense is the definition of cowardice because you not only go against the morality of your culture, you also shame any reason you may have to justify an assault on another person by showing that you yourself won't even give it the merit of contest.
While we're poking at each other for over generalizations, it might be wise not to make any without evidence. I said some people have difficulty learning in social environments and some people thrive in them, I wasn't pulling figures out of my ass or making blanket statements about the entire human race. If you even dip a toe into the theory of human interaction you'll discover that you can't paint everyone the same colour when it comes to individual learning behavior and especially not when dealing with individual learning within a group. The most basic things that are going to fly out at you are people with mild to moderate social phobias 6.8% and anxiety disorders 3.1%, people with learning disabilities such as Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, or other information processing disorders 15%, the biggest group is going to be people with an introvert personality type or mixed introvert-extrovert type depending on how they relate to group activity and are going to account for a good 50.7% of the population (Source: Myers, I. B., McCaulley, M. H., Quenk, N. L., & Hammer, A. L. (1998). MBTI Manual: A guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (3rd ed.). Palo Alto,CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. )
My point is that learning institutions need to provide options for people who have different learning styles and needs. Methods of education should not be based solely on tradition or the individual experience of certain people, be they administratiors, lecturers or students. It is a shame that people and even our colleges and universities are trying to push back against these alternative learning tools when what they need to do is embrace and improve them. I would be the last to argue that these methods don't need a lot of further development to reach their full potential but we need hands on experience to get there. If history has shown us anything, you can't stuff the genie back in the bottle once he's out.
Hence, an excellent reason to look for life where there is water. It is a known fact that life on Earth requires the presence of water and even though it is the only form of life we have observed, it's still observable evidence.
Nope, sorry, not a 'classic' argument among the scientific community. An interesting hypothesis but it has no evidence to back it up.
This is my biggest point of contention with your argument. I agree that we could make an attempt to look for life that is fundamentally different from us on the molecular level even though we would have to make huge assumptions about what to look for and would be left with not even the faintest idea of where to start. Even if we make all these leaps of faith and somehow find the time and resources to devote to it and then win the galactic lottery and find some form of non-carbon based, intelligent life, how would we even go about interacting with it? Such a life form would be so deeply different from us that even with our astronomical luck so far, the chances of its intelligence being remotely compatible with our own would be, for all practical purposes, 0%.
Carbon based extraterrestrial life is going to be weird enough as it is if we ever find any, we don't need to complicate the matter more by trying to commune with space rocks or gaseous clouds.
Where the heck do you kids get these ideas from. There is no known living thing on Earth that can function without the presence of water. There is a possibility that some form of life could be built around a different molecule but that's all just theory and conjecture until it's observed.
There are over 500 G type stars within 100 ly. According to this study, about 170 would have potentially habitable planets orbiting them. The point is not that we should attempt to travel to these planets, barring a fundamental rewrite of the laws of physics or an unfathomable leap in technology, we won't be going there any time soon. The key is these worlds may support intelligent life, life capable of communication, communication that may be established within 200 years at the outside maximum. A dozen of these stars are within 20 to 30 ly where we could see communication within a lifetime. The odds that intelligent life capable of radio communication exists on any life bearing planet may be slim but if it does, the odds that that life is far in advance of us in terms of age and possibly technological ability as well are orders of magnitude larger.
Remember, we are still on the leading edge of our scientific advances. Radio communication has only been known about for a little over 130 years, not only does this mean that we are still in our infancy but that our earliest communications may now just be garnering a response. Now more than ever we need to dedicate more attention to our local stellar neighborhood. All promising, near-by stars should be, at the least, monitored continuously and ideally we should be transmitting focused signals as well.
Given how much more we have learned about the structure of our galaxy and the stars that compose it over the last decade we can no longer ignore the sky above our heads. We have already seen the shores of the New World, an ocean may stand between us but men have cast their dreams upon the open waters before and we shall do so again.
Whoah nelly, I think you need to reel that in and pour a little fact juice on it before you go all L. Ron on us.
First, distances my friend. 1,000 ly is way over the top for this thought experiment. You probably want to start with something a little more manageable, somewhere around 100 ly. The reason is that once you get up around 1,000 ly you're already dealing with millions of stars and, as it happens, that's about the average thickness of our galaxy. With 100 ly we're down to a more manageable 3,500 stars, about 500 of which are G type (our Sun's range).
Second, this isn't the 17th centrury. The most effective way to communicate with an alien race is not going to be a heliograph. Sure, if you wanted to be over-the-top-even-a-backyard-kid-with-a-telescope-can-see-you we could build a satellite the size of Jupiter and blot out our sun in irregular patterns. Might be good for a bit of a laugh, we could send them Yo Momma So Fat jokes in Morse code (can you imagine the looks on their faces when they figured that one out? Hah!). If you really wanted to stick with optical communication it would be far simpler to just build a big fat space laser, the light would be much more coherent and we'd have greater bandwidth for the transmission since we could more easily modulate the light. Sticking with reality though, it's a million times easier to build large radio transmitters. After all, it's something we're already really good at and the requirements for power and location are more trivial to obtain. A massive, artificial radio source is going to be just as noticeable as a blinking star if not more so.
Third, we don't want to talk to the new kids on the block. I'll put this simply, if they are just about as advanced as we were 500 years ago then we can't help them anyways. Imagine if Galileo Galilei had received a message from the stars in 1610! Making the huge leap that he might be able to record the message let alone decode it (maybe it was just a Yo Momma joke), what on Earth is he going to do with it? 'Oh hey Pope Urban, guess what? The Earth revolves around the Sun aaaaand there's life on other planets.' 'Yes I'm sure, they sent a message about your mother...' Fact is, we only want to talk to them if they're actually going to understand the concept of communicating with an entirely different life form. We, as a civilization, are not even at that point.
In conclusion, dream on RicktheBrick, dream on. Just make sure you've got some knowledge to put behind those dreams and maybe one day venetian blinds in outer space will be a reality, if only to make fun of more primitive alien societies.
A 'Chinese Room' built inside a human skull.
Since that question is impossible to answer and skates around the original intent of the question which was proposing something more akin to the 'Ship of Theseus' I think I'll take a stab at it, although the answer is relatively obvious.
First, let me ask: are you the same person you were when you were 5? Do you even remember being 5? Can you tell me the reasoning behind decisions you made back then or give me an example of your thoughts and emotions throughout an average day at that age? Most people only have a hazy recollection of the early period of their life and the generally accepted reason is that the human brain does not fully finish developing until the early twenties. You are most likely a drastically different person now then when you were 5, 10 or even 17, you make different choices, feel differently about life, family and friends and have different goals and priorities. So were you the same person at that age? Generally, you would say yes but you've developed or 'grown up' since then. The fact is, we are in a constant state of change with regard to the brain, sometimes on a large physical scale with the maturation of different regions of the brain over time and sometimes on a minute level with the formation of new connections between individual neurons and the creation of new pathways of neural activity throughout the brain.
Do these changes change the way we behave? Yes, most certainly. Do these changes fundamentally alter who we are? That's a tricky one! As for how we feel about the matter, we would like to believe so and we deny that it happens. Someone can 'turn over a new leaf', right? They can 'grow up' or 'see the light' or 'make a new start'? But you are still you from day to day and year to year. You don't die every time you go to sleep and are remade anew when you wake in the morning. You still exist as a person even if you hold fundamentally different convictions and beliefs than you did in the past. Then who is this 'you' anyway? How can we, like Theseus' ship, replace each tiny part of your body over the years and still call you the same person? Maybe you are just the parts that don't change. Just a big bag of semi-permanent neurons wiring themselves up in different ways to make you dance and speak.
If we are truly just the deterministic result of our biological circuitry, then we have nothing to worry about when replacing parts of it. If it functions in exactly the same manner as the previous stuff, then we continue on as usual without even noticing a change. However, if there is something a little more subtle than neuro-chemical signals going on in there we might be looking at the potential for something else. To dig up and beat a long dead horse, if our consciousness is actually moreso the software running on top of the hardware rather than just an incredibly complex collection of pre-wired circuits, we now have the potential that our consciousness can change at a fundamental level. We are no longer shackled to the circuits we were born with but have the possibility of changing every detail of ourselves with sufficient knowledge.
As for how it all works, I believe we're somewhere in the middle. A mixture of physical neural circuits that respond to stimuli in a pre-determined manner, neural activity that mimics the behaviour of a set circuit but is subject to change over time, and more dynamic activity that feeds back on itself enough that it can make changes on the fly and display more emergent behavior.
TL;DR - parts of us are permanent but it doesn't matter if they're replace as long as they work the same, other parts change gradually anyways and so if they are changed over time it doesn't make you not 'you', the bits left over that make us act so uniquely human probably can't be replaced with hardware (or even current software for that matter) simply because we don't really know what they are or how they work. You might accidentally kill th
They are actually targeting the region of the brain responsible for motor learning (physical movement as a response to external stimuli) which is colloquially called 'muscle memory'. So yes, this rat does know Kung Fu.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'most people'. Some people will have a harder time learning from just the lecture, textbook and office hours / labs. That proportion of people is likely to be similair to the number of people that have difficulty learning in an environment where there are distractions such as other people talking amongst themselves while the lecture is ongoing. The strategy that is usually arrived at to overcome this, in the second case, is to make better use of the textbook and the professor during office hours; in the first case, I would imagine it would be to speak with other people attending the same course... after lecture. If you are taking a properly designed online course then there will be resources (such as online chat, forums, and email addresses of faculty) provided for you so that you may get in contact with the professors and other students. If you do not know how to use these resources, then maybe you should not be taking the online version of the course. If these resources weren't provided, there may be an issue with the institution's method of making it's course material available online. Possibly: A) the material is not meant as a substitute for the entire course or B) they did a crap job and need to fix it, which is the point of TFA.