That has to be the one thing I hate the most about proof-of-concept flights being extremely publicized - after all, this is the flight that we want to fail, if any of them, so that we can figure out exactly how the failure happened and correct it with no major science loss.
Granted, it was probably just balloon failure, and those you expect to happen a few percent of the time (or less, probably). All this basically has done is probably lowered spirits on the ULDB team- that's why I find it really harsh that we criticize NASA for the idea. They're feeling bad enough already, even though it was completely out of their hands.
It does kindof make you yearn for the days when proof-of-concept ideas were done in secret in military bases, and when things blew up, no one cared. You really look perfect when no one sees your mistakes.
The balloon isn't an alternative to commercial satellites - it's an alternative to scientific satellites.
It's cheap and effectively gets you out of the atmosphere. That's all you need for scientific experiments.
Plenty of science has actually already been done on balloons, and plenty of traditional science is migrating to balloons because of the cost advantage. Telescopes, for instance, are excellent candidates for balloon flights, if you can work out a few kinks here and there (pointing). The main disadvantage had been the float time - measured in hours previously. The ULDB will eliminate that disadvantage, and hopefully, ULDBs will start replacing many satellite missions which could have functioned fine on balloons.
There's never really a 'fight': NSBF always wins - they really, truly decide when to cut the experiment, not the scientists. The only time the scientists are involved is if it's a subjective-type thing, as in "well, if we allow a few more hours, it might not be possible to guarantee a safe touchdown" - safe, meaning to the payload, not to people. Balloons can't - as in, NSBF won't let them - fly near an area where, if the payload drifted to the ground, it would have a chance of hitting someone, or if the payload fell straight down, it would have a chance of hitting someone.
Yah. It's a really sad thing to hear, but this is the way balloon experiments go sometimes. It's also not a big concern, as well, since so long as you don't lose the payload, it's easy to just launch another balloon. Of course, the cost is upsetting, but it's acceptable in proof-of-concept flights.
Best of luck to the team - I hope their rapid "up-down" flight goes as good as ours did! Hope the payload's okay - and good luck on the next flight.
(Oh, and don't doubt that some of the members might be reading Slashdot even as this happens. Considering all you can really do sometimes is wait for approval, etc., there really isn't anything else to do.)
Not to offend any Australians. The only main concern is population density.
The ballooners actually have quite a bit of control over the balloon, actually. On the balloon campaign I was on, there was a problem with the first launch - the balloon actually had a leak in it, and so it was rapidly losing helium. Of course, it never could reach float altitude and the only concern then was getting the payload and balloon down without any risk or danger to people/livestock/environment.
It was rather impressive. The NSBF (National Scientific Ballooning Foundation) people are very impressive - very good at their jobs. They cut the payload at 40,000 feet, which was actually quite below what we were hoping to reach before cutting it down, but apparently the estimates for the necessary height for a safe landing were a bit conservative. On its descent, the payload missed power lines by a few feet, missed telephone wires by fewer, and landed about two feet away from a fence, on the only flat spot in the surrounding areas.
Needless to say, we were very, very impressed.
Anyway, the main reason I'm stating this is just to get out of a jam I got in arguing with someone last time - this isn't to say there's anything wrong with Australia - it's just that in this case, you have a large area where you can bring the balloon down safely without having any reasonable risk of danger.
Worst comes to worst, if the balloon gets within any manmade installation (i.e. has any - note *any* potential to do harm) they'd take a chase plane, and radio a command to it to cut the payload.
After all, it's a balloon. It's not like a plane or anything - it just floats. That's beneficial - you don't need any control systems. All you need is a GPS system and a radio. If it starts to head near anything manmade, you cut it. No big loss - just a few hours at float. That's why you wait forever to launch the thing - you wait till the winds are ideal.
NASA doesn't leave the balloon material in the wild. The balloons as they fall are tracked and recovered. NASA takes immense precautions when it comes to impacting both human life and wildlife. Please note that I'm being very serious about this, and not joking nor quoting some propaganda - having worked on a ballooning project, I know that the mission priorities come second to both human life and environmental impact. This is extremely frustrating sometimes, especially when you hope to get 40 hours at float, but, it's a good policy.
As an example, have you ever seen a scientific balloon up? Not unless you live in a few select areas of the country - ones with immense wide open spaces where a balloon's descent can be controlled accurately (New Mexico is one of them - Fort Sumner, to be specific). The instrument has to be recovered (you want it to fly again, after all) and so you recover both it and the balloon.
There's no danger to wildlife in this case. That factor has already been considered.
I really agree with this. I think it's very strange that in the US, everything has to be 'super-new' and 'super-tech' for it to be picked up by a publisher. In Japan, make-your-own-videogame programs actually do quite well, and there are tons of them. (RPGMakers, specifically... though there are others) Classic style games get dropped, even though there are tons of people (like me) who would gladly buy them. I'd give anything for more SNES Final Fantasies, or another Legend of Zelda on the N64 - granted, they'd have to be somewhat decent, but with a little practice and some advice from gamers, I think an open-minded programmer could easily do it.
It depends on what you -want- from a game, not 'how the game plays' - let's face it, there are only so many ways to design an interface for a game. I haven't seen a new interface in years. You've got top down, side scrolling, 3D platformer, isometric, stationary (i.e. Tetris, Dig Dug, etc.), and first person. There isn't anything else - not really. Mario 64 was the first 'new' interface I've seen in years, and it probably wasn't the first (come on, correct me).
What has changed about games is how they draw the player into their world - how you catch their interest. Zelda captured it with puzzles... not really much plot, but a lot of puzzles. It still does, to this day - the Zelda series has just gotten larger and expanded on this idea with better graphics, better interaction, and better storytelling. The fact that they reuse the basic 'catch' isn't important, as there are only so many of those 'catches' you can use.
Diablo's "catch", for me at least, was character advancement. Diablo wasn't Zelda - Diablo was Rogue - or probably more accurately, Angband or NetHack.
However, as you can probably see, I'm supporting your evidence (all games have predecessors from - not late 80s or earlier 90s, but early 80s and late 70s) but I disagree with your conclusion. The problem is that you're focusing on things that change ridiculously slowly. You want a new 'genre' of video game. I'm happy with the ones we have, thank you - I just want more. An occasional new genre would be nice, but for now, I'm happy with what we have.
Basically, the 'no innovation' claim is akin to saying "There's no innovation in modern literature." Well, in some respects, that's true - new genres aren't really born overnight, they take quite a bit of time to develop. But literature isn't going downhill, nor should they stop writing books in a current genre. Please! I am perfectly happy to read another slew of books by [Insert Favorite Author Here].
Gaming is another form of artistic expression, and I eagerly await each new Final Fantasy just like I would a new novel from Orson Scott Card (one of my favorite authors). Not because I expect something massively different, but because I want another Final Fantasy. It's that simple.
The problem, currently, is that we've got tons of Harlequin romances sitting on videogame shelves - we call them first-person shooters. They're thoughtless, mindless games that take two seconds to develop and sell like crazy. However, this didn't go away for the publishing industry, and it won't go away for the gaming industry. No loss, in my book.
How're you supposed to know there's no
atmosphere? Well, one, there's no weather:
the surface is totally unchanging, and
the moon DOES rotate, so if there was atmosphere, you would see something on the surface
changing. Look at Mars with a high-power telescope - its surface does change. Ditto with Venus, Jupiter, etc. Is this a convincing argument? Probably not to a hyperskeptical layman, but to most normal humans, it should be.
Other than that, do the math. You can figure out how big the moon is, since you know the period, therefore you know the distance. You assume it's a sphere (actually, you -know- it's a sphere, since you can see that lighting it from any angle produces a 'light' circle and a 'dark' circle... the only object that can act like that is a sphere) so you know its size. Now, it's composition is a curious question - you don't know what it's made of, so you'll never know its mass, truly. Or will you? If you truly want to convince yourself, get a solar filter, and *measure* the size of the sun, very, very accurately with it: over the course of a month, you'll see the sun grow and shrink in size as we get closer and farther due to 'wobbling' about the Earth-Moon center of mass. With that, you can figure out the ratio of the Earth's mass to the Moon's mass, so you know the Moon's mass. Now that you know the Moon's mass, you know what gasses it CAN hold in, and what gasses it CAN'T hold in - hydrostatic equilibrium, baby. Yup.
Do the math. Work it out. Guess what you'll find? The Moon doesn't have an atmosphere - it can't.
(As per the dust, well, that's common sense. Look at it. You see craters, volcanic flows, etc. How in the world would any of that form without creating rockslides, and very small particles (dust!))
Argh, argh, argh. Somehow hit 'submit' before I was finished typing. How aggravating.
It's true - there is no resistance in a true superconductor, isolated from all else, with an isolated current inside of it. However, place that superconductor in a circuit, and many various issues will arise, again, especially in T2 superconductors which will admit magnetic fields through their volume.
Still, the best way to describe it is to say that the superconductor has zero resistance, and that effectively you have additional objects introducing mitigating effects.
The first superconductor wasn't lead - distinctly not! - it was mercury. 1911, Heike Kammerlingh-Onnes, using liquid helium to cool mercury below 4K.
No, actually, impedance is a 'resistance' to current flow due to a changing magnetic field, which induces an opposite EMF in the circuit. Physically, the best analogy would be if you imagine resistance to be traffic slowing you down in a car: impedance would be similar to something like bad gas in a car reducing the amount of power available, or going up a hill (going up a hill is a weak analogy, but it has a strong parallel in the whole EMF/potential well thing).
No, it is not 'unrelated crap' at all - that's what information theory is about. "Pattern based" and "lookup based" compression is exactly identical to this style of compression, just using slightly longer 'objects', instead of individual bytes (chars).
And, for your information, entropy means exactly the same thing in compression as it does in physics: it's the total information available in the system. You can't compress something past its entropic limit without the compression being lossy. (There's no physical analog to information loss without black holes being involved, and even that's questionable).
What you're talking about is the fact that there are only "generic" compressors, rather than "format-specific" compressors - they treat all data as random byte-strings without any structure. I don't know if any 'format-specific' compressors exist: it seems that any useful program would have to include a whole lot of 'format-specific' types, and the main problem is that the things which store huge amounts of space *are* essentially random patterns of bytes.
No one's really worried about their text files filling up their hard drive. Honestly, I think if you can find a kind of file which compresses poorly via standard methods and takes up huge amounts of space, I'd be surprised. Video? Already have video-specific compression. Images? Already have image-specific compression. Audio? Already have audio-specific compression.
The problem with standard compressors nowadays has nothing to do with the method they use to compress: some extremely smart people are working on this, and they've found that this analog is exactly true - information theory works. Period.
It's not that the single electrons 'don't collide': coupled pairs of electrons are bosons, since spin 1/2 cross spin 1/2 yields either spin 1 or spin 0: both of which are bosonic.
You're probably familiar with the Pauli exclusion principle for electrons - this says that no two electrons (fermions) can occupy the same quantum state. This is because electrons, having spin 1/2, are fermions, and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics (interchanging fermions changes the sign of the wavefunction).
Bosons don't have a Pauli exclusion principle - interchanging bosons doesn't change the sign of the wavefunction at all, and so the number of particles which can occupy a state is unlimited.
Thus, imagine a pair of electrons in a material- nothing is stopping them from radiating their energy away and settling into the ground state- it doesn't matter that there are other pairs of electrons there, since a pair of electrons is a boson. They then settle into the ground state - the lowest energy state.
Now, you've got a curious situation. The electron pair is propagating through the material since there's a potential well - there are particles which they COULD scatter off of and lose energy - but they're in the ground state - they CAN'T lose energy, so they CAN'T scatter. It's not that the electrons don't collide 'as much': ideally, they don't collide at ALL - resistance zero.
As for the 'electron-pair' waves: the idea of waves and particles being separate things is a classical idea: Nature doesn't quite agree with that. Particles are waves, waves are particles, it's all the same bloody thing. Calling them 'electron-pair' waves is fine: calling them 'electron-pair' particles is also fine. de Broglie matter waves are also a semi-classical idea: halfway between QM and classical mechanics - it would be a good thing to abandon that idea, and just accept that fundamentally, all matter has a wavelike nature.
For a good start in QM, read D. Griffiths "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics": Griffiths's texts are usually quite amazingly good at allowing students to actually understand the physics of the situation. Getting rid of classical intuition like "physical location of a particle" and "momentum of a particle" and "particle" in general is a good thing to learn as soon as possible if you are interested in higher physics.
There are other processes in superconductors which do cause resistance-like effects, but fundamentally, the superconductor itself has zero resistance - you might have things like thermal resistance, or 'magnetic resistance', or impurity resistance, but the superconductor literally has zero resistance, almost (note almost) by definition.
Actually, no... its resistance does drop to zero, literally. However, the behavior becomes 'curious' when you actually try to drive current through it - especially since this is a T2 superconductor,which means that it forms magnetic whorls at any non-zero magnetic field. As you know, a current creates a magnetic field, and so you get a sort of 'balance' between the amount of current you can drive and the maximum field that the superconductor can support. If you try to drive more current than that, then you will begin to drive the substance out of a superconducting state.
Is it a resistance? Well, no, distinctly not - it's not linear in voltage, for one. It could be thought of as an 'effective' resistance, but it's not resistance.
Incidentally, it's very dangerous to simply show "Look, it's infinity!" and use that as a disproof - several things in nature are extremely curious and are literally infinity: take for instance a superfluid, which has, literally, zero viscosity, or an electron, which has (as far as we know...!) zero volume. Dividing by either of those things would tend towards infinity - the fact that it does not actually get to infinity simply means that another process begins to dominate and damp the previous one.
Yes, but there's a way that they're related mathematically and I can't remember. There's a sum in there somewhere so you get a number rather than a distribution, and I can't remember. I want to say that the partition function is actually something like the sum of the probabilities in the distribution, but there'd have to be something multiplying the sum or you'd get 1. Quite unfortunately, I still can't find my text on this, so I can't check this.
Well, I don't have to address the problems in your argument so far, as other people have. But, as per the black hole example, yes, Hawking radiation might possibly be an anti-entropic process, which is very interesting. However, the point is hotly contended, as it's tied up in quantum effects, and you're dealing with a region where we don't really understand the quantum effects.
It wasn't a bad example - it was a 'curious' example, because Hawking radiation is a 'curious' process. It is anti-entropic, at least to our understanding of it. Granted, we don't have a happy black hole to play with in the lab, but... who knows?
Hey, after all this, someone actually might be able to figure out some way to generate a better-than-Carnot engine using a black hole. Its cycle time would probably be insanely high (of order billions of years).
My personal guess, however, is that we're all smoking crack and there's quite a bit more to Hawking radiation than we think due to other effects. For instance... how exactly does the area of the black hole change upon emission of a Hawking quanta? Does it change perfectly radially? It can't - that would violate causality. It has to 'ripple' across the black hole - this will cause a gravitational wave as well. It's possible that this gravitational wave may contain additional information/entropy as well. I don't believe in perpetual motion machines.
By the way, I will "make that argument", and if I use a word in a way that's counter-intuitive, sucks to be you. Change your intuition. But, as others have pointed out, I'm not using it counter-intuitively at all - entropy is information. Period. End of story.
P.S.: I'm preemptively repairing a mistake of mine - the {1,0,0,0} distribution function becoming a {0, inf, inf,inf} information content is slightly wrong: that's technically surprise, not information. Getting a quarter doesn't surprise you at all, getting anything else surprises the hell out of you.
Surprise and information are related somehow, but I can't remember how, and I think my text on this is at work right now. So, if someone could fix that, I would be quite grateful.
OK. Physics analogy. We have a system (a text file) which has a set amount of entropy and a set amount of total energy. The free energy, therefore, is effectively going to be the total energy minus the entropy. (This isn't quite analogous to physics, because of dimensions, but here we're dimensionless. If you really care, assign k=1J/bit, and put us at a temperature of 1) Now, for one byte, the total energy is 8, the total entropy is 1 (again, dimensionally energy is 8 J, entropy is dimensionless (temperature is energy) so there's technically a factor of k lying around, but I don't care), so the free energy is 8-1=7. We can extract 7 bit of 'energy' from the system. Thus, we can reduce a byte from 8 bits to 1 bit without changing the entropy: thus, we can do it reversibly.
Hey. That sortof looks like a compression algorithm.
I wish I had moderator points left over... pointing out that he's an idiot (besides the flaming profanity) is the best I can do.
Wow, a chemist using a term wrong... amazing. To be specific, entropy doesn't come from chemistry, it comes from physics. Granted, these two were identical fields at the time, or at least, closely related, but the term came from studying thermodynamics, not chemistry.
OK. A little background on information theory for you - you know, from Shannon, back in the early 1900s, I believe, though correct me if I'm wrong. There is an object in information theory called the partition function of an experiment - it is essentially the chance of getting any result from that experiment. There is then an object called 'information', which is proportional to the log of the partition function. The lower a chance of getting a result, the higher the information content gleaned from that experiment. For instance, if you had a box full of quarters, and you randomly pulled out a coin, the partition function would be (quarters, dimes, nickles, pennies) {1,0,0,0}. The information content of that experiment is klogW: (0,inf,inf,inf)- you don't learn anything if you pull out a quarter. You knew there were only quarters to begin with. If you get any of the other ones, damn, you're surprised.
What does all of this have to do with entropy? Well, in thermodynamics, which is, you know, where the term COMES from, entropy is klogZ, where Z is the partition function of the system: essentially the same thing. k is Boltzmann's constant - it comes from the Celsius temperature scale.
So, here's the news flash: Entropy is information. Period. Therefore, he was using the term CORRECTLY, not INCORRECTLY. Entropy is USEFUL information, not USELESS information. Guess what? This is the same in chemistry, too. The universe doesn't care whether or not you can use energy for work, and entropy has nothing to do with 'randomness'. A 'random' distribution of matter in a universe will collapse to a 'nonrandom' sphere, thanks to gravity: if entropy was randomness, then the universe would have just violated the second law - it went from 'random' energy to 'nonrandom' energy. (mass=energy, so don't even try it)
Entropy is information. Period. Hence the second law of thermodynamics- entropy increases because the information content of the universe is increasing. If you doubt me on this, here's a simple bit to convince you: you have a system which goes from state 1 to state 2, both of which have the same entropy. Therefore, there is a reversible process which connects the two states, which means that one can go from state 1 to state 2 and leave no tracks inside the system that the change had happened - i.e., the information content of the system is static.
I'm really getting sick of having to explain this constantly - I wish they would never teach entropy as 'useless energy' or 'unusable energy' - like the universe cares whether or not something can be used for work.
The link between information and entropy is entirely well known and extraordinarily important. For instance, if an object falls into a black hole, is there no record of its existance anymore? Is all the information that was inside that object lost? No - a black hole's area is related to its entropy, which increases with mass. Therefore, the 'information' (as far as the Universe cares) in that object is now somehow stored in the black hole's event horizon. Curiously enough, an object which falls into a black hole is, from the outside world, constantly getting infinitesimally closer to the event horizon. This is a weak argument, yes, and changing a few words could make it stronger, but this is offtopic, so I don't care.
In closing - you're wrong. Entropy is useful information. 1 bit of entropy out of 8 means an 8:1 compression ratio. Here, you've 'extracted' 7 bits of 'work' out of the system. The remaining 1 bit of entropy cannot be removed from the system, as entropy can never decrease. (or in this case, cannot decrease without destroying the system)
I'm sorry, but you completely missed the point of the argument - I never once stated that humans could live in a vacuum. It's a question of reciprocity - can they do everything we can do to them back to us, and, put another way, can we do everything they can do to us?
I'm assuming you're talking about symbiotic bacteria that humans use: that doesn't say that they're superior to us, or that we don't 'hold dominion' over them. Can we eradicate the flora in our body? Yes. Would we ever want to? Well, no.
Could they ever eradicate us? Well, good point... possibly. But I do trust medical science to put up a good fight regardless.
Still, the comment is almost entirely moot - I wasn't claiming humans could live in a vacuum. What I was claiming there was that the previous argument (infectious diseases are more successful than humans) holds little water, as people can almost entirely insulate themselves from infectious diseases, whereas the reverse, well, isn't true. Here, the bacteria need the humans, the humans need the bacteria, so there's no question of superiority - on this simple level, they're equal. When you consider other species, however, our symbiotic bacteria cannot, for instance, kill any mammal on the planet. We can. Therefore, by some measure, we are more successful than they are.
In essence, the question comes down to what you define as succesful. The most natural definition, of course, is the longest lived and most prolific species, which of course, we are not. We do, however, now have the possibility to become the longest lived (see one comment over, one comment down: if we become non-Earthbound, our species lifespan is no longer limited to that of the Sun. The same cannot be said about any other species). That doesn't mean we are the longest lived, but it does give us a 'bonus point', if you will, over other species.
There's also a question of 'possibility' and of 'desire', though this is a bit hairier, as we don't know the desires of other species. We have the capability, for instance, to eradicate HIV from the human population. That's easy. We kill everyone with HIV. Poof. Note I didn't say it was ethical, desirable, or would ever happen! Just that it could. Humans, in general right now, have the capability to do far more than any other species on the planet, and *that* is the definition I was using for successful.
I don't have an extremely high opinion of humans, please note - I have an extremely high opinion of science and technology. Every time we have desparately needed something, we have found it. Granted, this argument is anthropomorphic (meaning that if the opposite were true, we wouldn't be here to argue the point) but it does have some intrinsic merit, in my opinion.
Please don't criticize people's views without giving actual points of criticism - that's the adult equivalent of saying "Nuh-uh!" I enjoy arguments - but what drives me crazy is someone offering a differing opinion but not willing to back it up.
No, was an entirely serious comment - you just missed a few comments in my post, and I forgot a few words to clarify things.
First off, I didn't mean that we created space - that should've said (in space, for example) - while Mir and the Space Station are not amazingly bacteria-free places, they do beat out Earth-based places pretty well. And if NASA really really wanted to, you could do much, much better than there.
Therefore, your next comment is slightly out of place - I wasn't talking about the current situation on Earth. That's pointless - every species has to fight disease, save possibly viruses (which are only questionably a life form), so the fact that humans have to fight them as well is immaterial. If we wanted to, a human being could totally avoid being exploited by these diseases, and people do! They live in bubbles, and they survive. The rest of us choose to live in a disease ridden environment for the simple benefit that it allows us to interact.
As per the HIV virus, HIV can barely even kill us anymore (not that it could in the first place). But that's not even the point! The fact is that we can do anything we want to the HIV virus, and it can do very little to us. It can infect us if we're dumb. It can kill us if, unfortunately, we do not have the proper medication for it. But we can do anything we want to it - and we do. Oohh, we do - we modify its genome regularly, and mess around with it plenty. (Note that when I said 'anything we want' - I meant anything we want with a single organism, not an entire species. To eradicate HIV would be possible - just not ethical).
As for the mosquito, unfortunately you're wrong that it's in our best interest to eradicate them - turns out male mosquitos are pollinators. Doesn't that suck - I would've been all for complete genocide otherwise. And again - we can do anything we want to a single mosquito. The fact that several billion of them constantly exist is just an annoyance, and if we WANTED to not deal with them anymore, we could. We could just leave the planet. That's extreme, but possible.
Finally, the longevity comment: Blue green algae, sharks, cats, dogs, and dolphins (assuming they DON'T have interstellar technology...) have a finite lifespan. They will die in approximately 100 million years. Period. The Sun will grow too bright, and begin vaporizing water on Earth. Since no living creature can survive in an environment where water cannot (as far as we know) - they will all die. If humans move off-planet, your comment about 'a lot of catching up to do' is pointless, because we will have infinite amount of time to catch up.
An Earthbound species has only the potential to have a lifespan of Now+100 million years. A non-Earthbound species does not have this limitation, and therefore can exceed that lifespan. Note that I said "potential" to become - not definitely.
(And we'll probably drag along bacteria, algae, etc. so that properly you would have to give them credit, but I think everyone here would agree that if aliens came down and saved humans in a hundred million years, we'd give them credit, not us.
There are a few counterarguments to bacteria, parasites, etc. that don't apply to humans. Granted, we're human, and so we have a biased point-of-view.
For instance: bacteria/parasites/diseases. We can produce an environment almost completely without bacteria/parasites/disease: (space, for instance) the bacteria cannot do the same with us (much as they try). The same essentially goes for domesticated animals- we don't need them around, we suffer their presence.
In essence, the point is just that while other animals may exploit humans, we choose to let them exploit us, whereas they have no choice as to whether or not we exploit them.
Think of it this way: if we founded a colony on Mars, and that colony brought no bacteria/domesticated animals, well, they wouldn't be able to exploit us then, would they? (Granted, new diseases would evolve, but this is different: every living being has to fend off other predators- the fact that humans do as well is immaterial)
Simply put: 'dominion' is actually somewhat the correct word for it. Humans are now capable of doing whatever we want to any living species on the planet. The same cannot be said about any other living species. In some respects, that makes us the most successful animal.
Plus, if we ever do migrate off-planet, then we have the potential to become the longest-lived animal species, which definitely qualifies as the most successful by Nature's definition.
This is the source of the "the stuff that dreams are made of" quote, not "the dreams that stuff is made from". Note the 'witty' switching of noun and object - oh so clever.
Slashdot Mirror
That has to be the one thing I hate the most about proof-of-concept flights being extremely publicized - after all, this is the flight that we want to fail, if any of them, so that we can figure out exactly how the failure happened and correct it with no major science loss.
Granted, it was probably just balloon failure, and those you expect to happen a few percent of the time (or less, probably). All this basically has done is probably lowered spirits on the ULDB team- that's why I find it really harsh that we criticize NASA for the idea. They're feeling bad enough already, even though it was completely out of their hands.
It does kindof make you yearn for the days when proof-of-concept ideas were done in secret in military bases, and when things blew up, no one cared. You really look perfect when no one sees your mistakes.
The balloon isn't an alternative to commercial satellites - it's an alternative to scientific satellites.
It's cheap and effectively gets you out of the atmosphere. That's all you need for scientific experiments.
Plenty of science has actually already been done on balloons, and plenty of traditional science is migrating to balloons because of the cost advantage. Telescopes, for instance, are excellent candidates for balloon flights, if you can work out a few kinks here and there (pointing). The main disadvantage had been the float time - measured in hours previously. The ULDB will eliminate that disadvantage, and hopefully, ULDBs will start replacing many satellite missions which could have functioned fine on balloons.
There's never really a 'fight': NSBF always wins - they really, truly decide when to cut the experiment, not the scientists. The only time the scientists are involved is if it's a subjective-type thing, as in "well, if we allow a few more hours, it might not be possible to guarantee a safe touchdown" - safe, meaning to the payload, not to people. Balloons can't - as in, NSBF won't let them - fly near an area where, if the payload drifted to the ground, it would have a chance of hitting someone, or if the payload fell straight down, it would have a chance of hitting someone.
Yah. It's a really sad thing to hear, but this is the way balloon experiments go sometimes. It's also not a big concern, as well, since so long as you don't lose the payload, it's easy to just launch another balloon. Of course, the cost is upsetting, but it's acceptable in proof-of-concept flights.
Best of luck to the team - I hope their rapid "up-down" flight goes as good as ours did! Hope the payload's okay - and good luck on the next flight.
(Oh, and don't doubt that some of the members might be reading Slashdot even as this happens. Considering all you can really do sometimes is wait for approval, etc., there really isn't anything else to do.)
Texas.
Most likely, yes.
Not to offend any Australians. The only main concern is population density.
The ballooners actually have quite a bit of control over the balloon, actually. On the balloon campaign I was on, there was a problem with the first launch - the balloon actually had a leak in it, and so it was rapidly losing helium. Of course, it never could reach float altitude and the only concern then was getting the payload and balloon down without any risk or danger to people/livestock/environment.
It was rather impressive. The NSBF (National Scientific Ballooning Foundation) people are very impressive - very good at their jobs. They cut the payload at 40,000 feet, which was actually quite below what we were hoping to reach before cutting it down, but apparently the estimates for the necessary height for a safe landing were a bit conservative. On its descent, the payload missed power lines by a few feet, missed telephone wires by fewer, and landed about two feet away from a fence, on the only flat spot in the surrounding areas.
Needless to say, we were very, very impressed.
Anyway, the main reason I'm stating this is just to get out of a jam I got in arguing with someone last time - this isn't to say there's anything wrong with Australia - it's just that in this case, you have a large area where you can bring the balloon down safely without having any reasonable risk of danger.
Worst comes to worst, if the balloon gets within any manmade installation (i.e. has any - note *any* potential to do harm) they'd take a chase plane, and radio a command to it to cut the payload.
After all, it's a balloon. It's not like a plane or anything - it just floats. That's beneficial - you don't need any control systems. All you need is a GPS system and a radio. If it starts to head near anything manmade, you cut it. No big loss - just a few hours at float. That's why you wait forever to launch the thing - you wait till the winds are ideal.
NASA doesn't leave the balloon material in the wild. The balloons as they fall are tracked and recovered. NASA takes immense precautions when it comes to impacting both human life and wildlife. Please note that I'm being very serious about this, and not joking nor quoting some propaganda - having worked on a ballooning project, I know that the mission priorities come second to both human life and environmental impact. This is extremely frustrating sometimes, especially when you hope to get 40 hours at float, but, it's a good policy.
As an example, have you ever seen a scientific balloon up? Not unless you live in a few select areas of the country - ones with immense wide open spaces where a balloon's descent can be controlled accurately (New Mexico is one of them - Fort Sumner, to be specific). The instrument has to be recovered (you want it to fly again, after all) and so you recover both it and the balloon.
There's no danger to wildlife in this case. That factor has already been considered.
I really agree with this. I think it's very strange that in the US, everything has to be 'super-new' and 'super-tech' for it to be picked up by a publisher. In Japan, make-your-own-videogame programs actually do quite well, and there are tons of them. (RPGMakers, specifically... though there are others) Classic style games get dropped, even though there are tons of people (like me) who would gladly buy them. I'd give anything for more SNES Final Fantasies, or another Legend of Zelda on the N64 - granted, they'd have to be somewhat decent, but with a little practice and some advice from gamers, I think an open-minded programmer could easily do it.
It depends on what you -want- from a game, not 'how the game plays' - let's face it, there are only so many ways to design an interface for a game. I haven't seen a new interface in years. You've got top down, side scrolling, 3D platformer, isometric, stationary (i.e. Tetris, Dig Dug, etc.), and first person. There isn't anything else - not really. Mario 64 was the first 'new' interface I've seen in years, and it probably wasn't the first (come on, correct me).
What has changed about games is how they draw the player into their world - how you catch their interest. Zelda captured it with puzzles... not really much plot, but a lot of puzzles. It still does, to this day - the Zelda series has just gotten larger and expanded on this idea with better graphics, better interaction, and better storytelling. The fact that they reuse the basic 'catch' isn't important, as there are only so many of those 'catches' you can use.
Diablo's "catch", for me at least, was character advancement. Diablo wasn't Zelda - Diablo was Rogue - or probably more accurately, Angband or NetHack.
However, as you can probably see, I'm supporting your evidence (all games have predecessors from - not late 80s or earlier 90s, but early 80s and late 70s) but I disagree with your conclusion. The problem is that you're focusing on things that change ridiculously slowly. You want a new 'genre' of video game. I'm happy with the ones we have, thank you - I just want more. An occasional new genre would be nice, but for now, I'm happy with what we have.
Basically, the 'no innovation' claim is akin to saying "There's no innovation in modern literature." Well, in some respects, that's true - new genres aren't really born overnight, they take quite a bit of time to develop. But literature isn't going downhill, nor should they stop writing books in a current genre. Please! I am perfectly happy to read another slew of books by [Insert Favorite Author Here].
Gaming is another form of artistic expression, and I eagerly await each new Final Fantasy just like I would a new novel from Orson Scott Card (one of my favorite authors). Not because I expect something massively different, but because I want another Final Fantasy. It's that simple.
The problem, currently, is that we've got tons of Harlequin romances sitting on videogame shelves - we call them first-person shooters. They're thoughtless, mindless games that take two seconds to develop and sell like crazy. However, this didn't go away for the publishing industry, and it won't go away for the gaming industry. No loss, in my book.
How're you supposed to know there's no
atmosphere? Well, one, there's no weather:
the surface is totally unchanging, and
the moon DOES rotate, so if there was atmosphere, you would see something on the surface
changing. Look at Mars with a high-power telescope - its surface does change. Ditto with Venus, Jupiter, etc. Is this a convincing argument? Probably not to a hyperskeptical layman, but to most normal humans, it should be.
Other than that, do the math. You can figure out how big the moon is, since you know the period, therefore you know the distance. You assume it's a sphere (actually, you -know- it's a sphere, since you can see that lighting it from any angle produces a 'light' circle and a 'dark' circle... the only object that can act like that is a sphere) so you know its size. Now, it's composition is a curious question - you don't know what it's made of, so you'll never know its mass, truly. Or will you? If you truly want to convince yourself, get a solar filter, and *measure* the size of the sun, very, very accurately with it: over the course of a month, you'll see the sun grow and shrink in size as we get closer and farther due to 'wobbling' about the Earth-Moon center of mass. With that, you can figure out the ratio of the Earth's mass to the Moon's mass, so you know the Moon's mass. Now that you know the Moon's mass, you know what gasses it CAN hold in, and what gasses it CAN'T hold in - hydrostatic equilibrium, baby. Yup.
Do the math. Work it out. Guess what you'll find? The Moon doesn't have an atmosphere - it can't.
(As per the dust, well, that's common sense. Look at it. You see craters, volcanic flows, etc. How in the world would any of that form without creating rockslides, and very small particles (dust!))
Argh, argh, argh. Somehow hit 'submit' before I was finished typing. How aggravating.
It's true - there is no resistance in a true superconductor, isolated from all else, with an isolated current inside of it. However, place that superconductor in a circuit, and many various issues will arise, again, especially in T2 superconductors which will admit magnetic fields through their volume.
Still, the best way to describe it is to say that the superconductor has zero resistance, and that effectively you have additional objects introducing mitigating effects.
The first superconductor wasn't lead - distinctly not! - it was mercury. 1911, Heike Kammerlingh-Onnes, using liquid helium to cool mercury below 4K.
No, actually, impedance is a 'resistance' to current flow due to a changing magnetic field, which induces an opposite EMF in the circuit. Physically, the best analogy would be if you imagine resistance to be traffic slowing you down in a car: impedance would be similar to something like bad gas in a car reducing the amount of power available, or going up a hill (going up a hill is a weak analogy, but it has a strong parallel in the whole EMF/potential well thing).
No, it is not 'unrelated crap' at all - that's what information theory is about. "Pattern based" and "lookup based" compression is exactly identical to this style of compression, just using slightly longer 'objects', instead of individual bytes (chars).
And, for your information, entropy means exactly the same thing in compression as it does in physics: it's the total information available in the system. You can't compress something past its entropic limit without the compression being lossy. (There's no physical analog to information loss without black holes being involved, and even that's questionable).
What you're talking about is the fact that there are only "generic" compressors, rather than "format-specific" compressors - they treat all data as random byte-strings without any structure. I don't know if any 'format-specific' compressors exist: it seems that any useful program would have to include a whole lot of 'format-specific' types, and the main problem is that the things which store huge amounts of space *are* essentially random patterns of bytes.
No one's really worried about their text files filling up their hard drive. Honestly, I think if you can find a kind of file which compresses poorly via standard methods and takes up huge amounts of space, I'd be surprised. Video? Already have video-specific compression. Images? Already have image-specific compression. Audio? Already have audio-specific compression.
The problem with standard compressors nowadays has nothing to do with the method they use to compress: some extremely smart people are working on this, and they've found that this analog is exactly true - information theory works. Period.
It's not that the single electrons 'don't collide': coupled pairs of electrons are bosons, since spin 1/2 cross spin 1/2 yields either spin 1 or spin 0: both of which are bosonic.
You're probably familiar with the Pauli exclusion principle for electrons - this says that no two electrons (fermions) can occupy the same quantum state. This is because electrons, having spin 1/2, are fermions, and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics (interchanging fermions changes the sign of the wavefunction).
Bosons don't have a Pauli exclusion principle - interchanging bosons doesn't change the sign of the wavefunction at all, and so the number of particles which can occupy a state is unlimited.
Thus, imagine a pair of electrons in a material- nothing is stopping them from radiating their energy away and settling into the ground state- it doesn't matter that there are other pairs of electrons there, since a pair of electrons is a boson. They then settle into the ground state - the lowest energy state.
Now, you've got a curious situation. The electron pair is propagating through the material since there's a potential well - there are particles which they COULD scatter off of and lose energy - but they're in the ground state - they CAN'T lose energy, so they CAN'T scatter. It's not that the electrons don't collide 'as much': ideally, they don't collide at ALL - resistance zero.
As for the 'electron-pair' waves: the idea of waves and particles being separate things is a classical idea: Nature doesn't quite agree with that. Particles are waves, waves are particles, it's all the same bloody thing. Calling them 'electron-pair' waves is fine: calling them 'electron-pair' particles is also fine. de Broglie matter waves are also a semi-classical idea: halfway between QM and classical mechanics - it would be a good thing to abandon that idea, and just accept that fundamentally, all matter has a wavelike nature.
For a good start in QM, read D. Griffiths "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics": Griffiths's texts are usually quite amazingly good at allowing students to actually understand the physics of the situation. Getting rid of classical intuition like "physical location of a particle" and "momentum of a particle" and "particle" in general is a good thing to learn as soon as possible if you are interested in higher physics.
There are other processes in superconductors which do cause resistance-like effects, but fundamentally, the superconductor itself has zero resistance - you might have things like thermal resistance, or 'magnetic resistance', or impurity resistance, but the superconductor literally has zero resistance, almost (note almost) by definition.
Actually, no... its resistance does drop to zero, literally. However, the behavior becomes 'curious' when you actually try to drive current through it - especially since this is a T2 superconductor,which means that it forms magnetic whorls at any non-zero magnetic field. As you know, a current creates a magnetic field, and so you get a sort of 'balance' between the amount of current you can drive and the maximum field that the superconductor can support. If you try to drive more current than that, then you will begin to drive the substance out of a superconducting state.
Is it a resistance? Well, no, distinctly not - it's not linear in voltage, for one. It could be thought of as an 'effective' resistance, but it's not resistance.
Incidentally, it's very dangerous to simply show "Look, it's infinity!" and use that as a disproof - several things in nature are extremely curious and are literally infinity: take for instance a superfluid, which has, literally, zero viscosity, or an electron, which has (as far as we know...!) zero volume. Dividing by either of those things would tend towards infinity - the fact that it does not actually get to infinity simply means that another process begins to dominate and damp the previous one.
Yes, but there's a way that they're related mathematically and I can't remember. There's a sum in there somewhere so you get a number rather than a distribution, and I can't remember. I want to say that the partition function is actually something like the sum of the probabilities in the distribution, but there'd have to be something multiplying the sum or you'd get 1. Quite unfortunately, I still can't find my text on this, so I can't check this.
Well, I don't have to address the problems in your argument so far, as other people have. But, as per the black hole example, yes, Hawking radiation might possibly be an anti-entropic process, which is very interesting. However, the point is hotly contended, as it's tied up in quantum effects, and you're dealing with a region where we don't really understand the quantum effects.
It wasn't a bad example - it was a 'curious' example, because Hawking radiation is a 'curious' process. It is anti-entropic, at least to our understanding of it. Granted, we don't have a happy black hole to play with in the lab, but... who knows?
Hey, after all this, someone actually might be able to figure out some way to generate a better-than-Carnot engine using a black hole. Its cycle time would probably be insanely high (of order billions of years).
My personal guess, however, is that we're all smoking crack and there's quite a bit more to Hawking radiation than we think due to other effects. For instance... how exactly does the area of the black hole change upon emission of a Hawking quanta? Does it change perfectly radially? It can't - that would violate causality. It has to 'ripple' across the black hole - this will cause a gravitational wave as well. It's possible that this gravitational wave may contain additional information/entropy as well. I don't believe in perpetual motion machines.
By the way, I will "make that argument", and if I use a word in a way that's counter-intuitive, sucks to be you. Change your intuition. But, as others have pointed out, I'm not using it counter-intuitively at all - entropy is information. Period. End of story.
P.S.: I'm preemptively repairing a mistake of mine - the {1,0,0,0} distribution function becoming a {0, inf, inf ,inf} information content is slightly wrong: that's technically surprise, not information. Getting a quarter doesn't surprise you at all, getting anything else surprises the hell out of you.
:)
Surprise and information are related somehow, but I can't remember how, and I think my text on this is at work right now. So, if someone could fix that, I would be quite grateful.
How's that for a first on Slashdot?
OK. Physics analogy. We have a system (a text file) which has a set amount of entropy and a set amount of total energy. The free energy, therefore, is effectively going to be the total energy minus the entropy. (This isn't quite analogous to physics, because of dimensions, but here we're dimensionless. If you really care, assign k=1J/bit, and put us at a temperature of 1) Now, for one byte, the total energy is 8, the total entropy is 1 (again, dimensionally energy is 8 J, entropy is dimensionless (temperature is energy) so there's technically a factor of k lying around, but I don't care), so the free energy is 8-1=7. We can extract 7 bit of 'energy' from the system. Thus, we can reduce a byte from 8 bits to 1 bit without changing the entropy: thus, we can do it reversibly.
Hey. That sortof looks like a compression algorithm.
I wish I had moderator points left over... pointing out that he's an idiot (besides the flaming profanity) is the best I can do.
Wow, a chemist using a term wrong... amazing. To be specific, entropy doesn't come from chemistry, it comes from physics. Granted, these two were identical fields at the time, or at least, closely related, but the term came from studying thermodynamics, not chemistry.
OK. A little background on information theory for you - you know, from Shannon, back in the early 1900s, I believe, though correct me if I'm wrong. There is an object in information theory called the partition function of an experiment - it is essentially the chance of getting any result from that experiment. There is then an object called 'information', which is proportional to the log of the partition function. The lower a chance of getting a result, the higher the information content gleaned from that experiment. For instance, if you had a box full of quarters, and you randomly pulled out a coin, the partition function would be (quarters, dimes, nickles, pennies) {1,0,0,0}. The information content of that experiment is klogW: (0,inf,inf,inf)- you don't learn anything if you pull out a quarter. You knew there were only quarters to begin with. If you get any of the other ones, damn, you're surprised.
What does all of this have to do with entropy? Well, in thermodynamics, which is, you know, where the term COMES from, entropy is klogZ, where Z is the partition function of the system: essentially the same thing. k is Boltzmann's constant - it comes from the Celsius temperature scale.
So, here's the news flash: Entropy is information. Period. Therefore, he was using the term CORRECTLY, not INCORRECTLY. Entropy is USEFUL information, not USELESS information. Guess what? This is the same in chemistry, too. The universe doesn't care whether or not you can use energy for work, and entropy has nothing to do with 'randomness'. A 'random' distribution of matter in a universe will collapse to a 'nonrandom' sphere, thanks to gravity: if entropy was randomness, then the universe would have just violated the second law - it went from 'random' energy to 'nonrandom' energy. (mass=energy, so don't even try it)
Entropy is information. Period. Hence the second law of thermodynamics- entropy increases because the information content of the universe is increasing. If you doubt me on this, here's a simple bit to convince you: you have a system which goes from state 1 to state 2, both of which have the same entropy. Therefore, there is a reversible process which connects the two states, which means that one can go from state 1 to state 2 and leave no tracks inside the system that the change had happened - i.e., the information content of the system is static.
I'm really getting sick of having to explain this constantly - I wish they would never teach entropy as 'useless energy' or 'unusable energy' - like the universe cares whether or not something can be used for work.
The link between information and entropy is entirely well known and extraordinarily important. For instance, if an object falls into a black hole, is there no record of its existance anymore? Is all the information that was inside that object lost? No - a black hole's area is related to its entropy, which increases with mass. Therefore, the 'information' (as far as the Universe cares) in that object is now somehow stored in the black hole's event horizon. Curiously enough, an object which falls into a black hole is, from the outside world, constantly getting infinitesimally closer to the event horizon. This is a weak argument, yes, and changing a few words could make it stronger, but this is offtopic, so I don't care.
In closing - you're wrong. Entropy is useful information. 1 bit of entropy out of 8 means an 8:1 compression ratio. Here, you've 'extracted' 7 bits of 'work' out of the system. The remaining 1 bit of entropy cannot be removed from the system, as entropy can never decrease. (or in this case, cannot decrease without destroying the system)
I'm sorry, but you completely missed the point of the argument - I never once stated that humans could live in a vacuum. It's a question of reciprocity - can they do everything we can do to them back to us, and, put another way, can we do everything they can do to us?
I'm assuming you're talking about symbiotic bacteria that humans use: that doesn't say that they're superior to us, or that we don't 'hold dominion' over them. Can we eradicate the flora in our body? Yes. Would we ever want to? Well, no.
Could they ever eradicate us? Well, good point... possibly. But I do trust medical science to put up a good fight regardless.
Still, the comment is almost entirely moot - I wasn't claiming humans could live in a vacuum. What I was claiming there was that the previous argument (infectious diseases are more successful than humans) holds little water, as people can almost entirely insulate themselves from infectious diseases, whereas the reverse, well, isn't true. Here, the bacteria need the humans, the humans need the bacteria, so there's no question of superiority - on this simple level, they're equal. When you consider other species, however, our symbiotic bacteria cannot, for instance, kill any mammal on the planet. We can. Therefore, by some measure, we are more successful than they are.
In essence, the question comes down to what you define as succesful. The most natural definition, of course, is the longest lived and most prolific species, which of course, we are not. We do, however, now have the possibility to become the longest lived (see one comment over, one comment down: if we become non-Earthbound, our species lifespan is no longer limited to that of the Sun. The same cannot be said about any other species). That doesn't mean we are the longest lived, but it does give us a 'bonus point', if you will, over other species.
There's also a question of 'possibility' and of 'desire', though this is a bit hairier, as we don't know the desires of other species. We have the capability, for instance, to eradicate HIV from the human population. That's easy. We kill everyone with HIV. Poof. Note I didn't say it was ethical, desirable, or would ever happen! Just that it could. Humans, in general right now, have the capability to do far more than any other species on the planet, and *that* is the definition I was using for successful.
I don't have an extremely high opinion of humans, please note - I have an extremely high opinion of science and technology. Every time we have desparately needed something, we have found it. Granted, this argument is anthropomorphic (meaning that if the opposite were true, we wouldn't be here to argue the point) but it does have some intrinsic merit, in my opinion.
Please don't criticize people's views without giving actual points of criticism - that's the adult equivalent of saying "Nuh-uh!" I enjoy arguments - but what drives me crazy is someone offering a differing opinion but not willing to back it up.
No, was an entirely serious comment - you just missed a few comments in my post, and I forgot a few words to clarify things.
First off, I didn't mean that we created space - that should've said (in space, for example) - while Mir and the Space Station are not amazingly bacteria-free places, they do beat out Earth-based places pretty well. And if NASA really really wanted to, you could do much, much better than there.
Therefore, your next comment is slightly out of place - I wasn't talking about the current situation on Earth. That's pointless - every species has to fight disease, save possibly viruses (which are only questionably a life form), so the fact that humans have to fight them as well is immaterial. If we wanted to, a human being could totally avoid being exploited by these diseases, and people do! They live in bubbles, and they survive. The rest of us choose to live in a disease ridden environment for the simple benefit that it allows us to interact.
As per the HIV virus, HIV can barely even kill us anymore (not that it could in the first place). But that's not even the point! The fact is that we can do anything we want to the HIV virus, and it can do very little to us. It can infect us if we're dumb. It can kill us if, unfortunately, we do not have the proper medication for it. But we can do anything we want to it - and we do. Oohh, we do - we modify its genome regularly, and mess around with it plenty. (Note that when I said 'anything we want' - I meant anything we want with a single organism, not an entire species. To eradicate HIV would be possible - just not ethical).
As for the mosquito, unfortunately you're wrong that it's in our best interest to eradicate them - turns out male mosquitos are pollinators. Doesn't that suck - I would've been all for complete genocide otherwise. And again - we can do anything we want to a single mosquito. The fact that several billion of them constantly exist is just an annoyance, and if we WANTED to not deal with them anymore, we could. We could just leave the planet. That's extreme, but possible.
Finally, the longevity comment: Blue green algae, sharks, cats, dogs, and dolphins (assuming they DON'T have interstellar technology...) have a finite lifespan. They will die in approximately 100 million years. Period. The Sun will grow too bright, and begin vaporizing water on Earth. Since no living creature can survive in an environment where water cannot (as far as we know) - they will all die. If humans move off-planet, your comment about 'a lot of catching up to do' is pointless, because we will have infinite amount of time to catch up.
An Earthbound species has only the potential to have a lifespan of Now+100 million years. A non-Earthbound species does not have this limitation, and therefore can exceed that lifespan. Note that I said "potential" to become - not definitely.
(And we'll probably drag along bacteria, algae, etc. so that properly you would have to give them credit, but I think everyone here would agree that if aliens came down and saved humans in a hundred million years, we'd give them credit, not us.
There are a few counterarguments to bacteria, parasites, etc. that don't apply to humans. Granted, we're human, and so we have a biased point-of-view.
For instance: bacteria/parasites/diseases. We can produce an environment almost completely without bacteria/parasites/disease: (space, for instance) the bacteria cannot do the same with us (much as they try). The same essentially goes for domesticated animals- we don't need them around, we suffer their presence.
In essence, the point is just that while other animals may exploit humans, we choose to let them exploit us, whereas they have no choice as to whether or not we exploit them.
Think of it this way: if we founded a colony on Mars, and that colony brought no bacteria/domesticated animals, well, they wouldn't be able to exploit us then, would they? (Granted, new diseases would evolve, but this is different: every living being has to fend off other predators- the fact that humans do as well is immaterial)
Simply put: 'dominion' is actually somewhat the correct word for it. Humans are now capable of doing whatever we want to any living species on the planet. The same cannot be said about any other living species. In some respects, that makes us the most successful animal.
Plus, if we ever do migrate off-planet, then we have the potential to become the longest-lived animal species, which definitely qualifies as the most successful by Nature's definition.
This is the source of the "the stuff that dreams are made of" quote, not "the dreams that stuff is made from". Note the 'witty' switching of noun and object - oh so clever.