Once again it must be pointed out that preventing the brain from degrading is a HUGE focus of projects like these. Because yeah, if everybody goes senile at 80 it's not much good for the bodies to live to 200. We know. It's part of the goal.
And what, just because people don't follow the best practices for living as long as possible, they don't deserve to live longer? Fuck that. And here you were just talking about how quality of life and length of life were two completely different things.
You're missing the point. I'm not arguing about whether we _can_ improve life expectancy. I'm saying that if we do, it won't be by tacking on miserable years. In order to make you live longer, we need to fix the things that are killing you. Stuff like failing organs, where the effects are compounded (Bad kidneys? Now every other organ is swimming in ammonia. Bad liver? Your blood is full of methanol and other toxins...). And yeah, the toughest bit will probably be in trying to figure out how to keep our brains working. But if we do manage to fix these things, you won't be bedridden for fifty years. You'll be happy and mobile.
You seem to think that we're discussing more stopgap measures, like blood filtering after kidneys fail, or drugs that reduce the risk of cardiac arrest long enough for the patients liver to fail instead. No. We want to slap new organs in there, or find drugs that will prevent the failure to start with.
Thank you. I'm always confused by the idiots in threads like this that immediately start talking about how horrible it would be, with an extra forty or fifty years of suffering. That's not how it works! You're suffering and miserable at the end of your life because there's a bunch of stuff killing you.
I generally consider Aubrey de Grey a quack, and hate that he's the face of the longevity movement (I suspect it's just the mind-blowing beard). But there is one thing he said that I really like. To paraphrase, if you ask people if they want an extra forty years of life, a lot will say no. If you ask instead if they want to keep the body of a thirty year old until they're eighty, with the consequence that they live an extra forty years, they almost all say yes.
But they didn't! The damn plant had another safety shutdown because the reactor vessel was corroded to hell. I happened in 2009 and lasted over a year. Worldwide shortage of medical isotopes because *nobody had prepared for another shutdown.*
And as a point of interest, according to the safety commissioner, the risk was pegged at 1 in 1000. Which is pretty damn far away from the one in a million standard.
Maybe. I think that might be debatable - some people have raised what I think are valid points about the practicality of any proposed rescue scenario. There are some situations that are simply not survivable, or require so many things to go right that the risk to others is not justifiable. I don't know what the managers were actually thinking, so I cannot say if they were reasoning that there was simply no point in checking for damage, or if they were just ignoring a potentially dangerous situation.
But that's the point. It's the regulator's job to enforce the standards. The government cannot say "well, we're going to make an exception here. And here. Oh, and over there too." I realize the dilemma as far as probable harm to humans goes, but there's a huge risk in the downward slide of standards. This plant can't go offline because we'd have an isotope shortage, these ones cannot go offline because there'd be a power shortage. So exception after exception is made until you end up with a reactor that is blatantly unsafe.
I used to really love nuclear power. I believed that a safe plant was simply a matter of good design and good regulatory structure.
Then came the safety shutdown of the medical isotope reactor at Chalk River. "Good!" I thought. "The system works just like it should." The pressure started mounting because of the shortage. The safety commissioner refused to reopen the plant, and the pressure got worse. Then the government fired her and ordered the plant open again.
Nuclear plants are great, until the time comes when closing them is just too expensive. Then the government changes from engineering them to be safe to legislating them to be safe. Because nature is bound to follow legislation/s
No, it's pragmatism. The safety margins are set quite high during design, and in reality you start encroaching on those margins. That's part of the reason they're there - they save you from disaster when reality does something unexpected. In this case, it wasn't enough. And in the case of Challenger that wasn't enough. I'm not saying that they handled these strikes well, I'm saying that the guys in charge were not sociopaths or risking people's lives for the hell of it. They were humans, and they made mistakes that cost people dearly and I think that they are all very aware of that fact.
Sure, NASA's got problems. But have you ever worked in any kind of engineering position? "I've got concerns about this" Is something you hear a hundred times a day. And yeah, maybe the managers didn't understand things well enough to be able to tell which concerns were important and which were minor. But do you think that they said to themselves, "Well this might kill people, but that's a risk I'm willing to take?"
On orbit repair sounds great, except that building all the hardware is more expensive than just letting the shuttle burn up and riding back down on a soyuz.
And Orion is just stupid through and through. It's a rocket designed by politics with requirements changing every couple years. That's not really NASA's fault.
Fuck you. I don't normally go for insults, I like reasoned discussion. But fuck you if you think that the engineers and managers involved in the disaster weren't devastated. They made a choice, and it was the wrong choice. But you don't know jack shit about what went into that choice. How many times had there been foam strikes with no damage? How many times had they sacrificed part of the mission to do inspection, only to find no damage?
Except that is what they do. The scientists do some base trials so they know they're not giving you something that's stupidly toxic, then they sign up enough people who are similar enough in symptoms that the results can actually be analyzed, then they give them to you and hope you don't die. If the drug is awesomely good, they end the trial early and give it to more people.
If you just give people drugs randomly, cost doesn't go down. All that happens is that you stop being able to track how effective the drug candidates are, and have lots of people dead from drinking toxic snake oil.
Not Really. We can make self-replicating amino-acid chains [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8700225 ], and we can make amino acids themselves through electrical discharges (ie. lightning) into common compounds. The two occurring together might be low probability, but hardly impossible.
To dig into your 'distinction' a bit - Are viruses alive? They have none of the machinery required to 'live.' No way to move, no way to generate energy, no way to reproduce. Yet they evolve and adapt, features we normally would limit to living creatures. Or Prions, misfolded proteins. They have no machinery at all, simply acting as a catalyst to misfold other proteins. Yet they reproduce.
There really isn't a difference in kind between 'alive' things and 'collections of matter.'
Muscles are not magical energy conversion systems, they are composed of complicated proteins that bend and twist and contract, driven by chemical reactions that are well known. We can make the same reactions happen with artificial proteins, no problem.
Cells are not magical 'alive' packages, they are sacks of dirty water contained in a lipid bilayer. Something we can make with a syringe of oil and a bucket of water.
'Alive' is shorthand for 'complicated.' But science is pretty clear about what's happening.
You called him Buzzard. That's a heck of a typo if you were not trying to be insulting. Saying it's against the theory and experiment is fine, and I gave you my reply to that.
Polywell has had several reviews, though we don't know the specifics. If I remember correctly, the project is only funded on a year-to-year basis, so the navy must think they're on to _something_. I wish that the results were public! Then we'd actually have something to argue over.
I'm a little bit surprised that you consider General Fusion to be even a Dark Horse. I cannot say anything about the fusion reaction, but the mechanical engineering would be a true nightmare.
That's fine. I didn't say 'defund ITER,' the materials science and plasma research IS valuable. What you said was 'defund Polywell and focus fusion' when they are taking a tiny portion of the funding pie. And like you said, if you kill those, it's not like ITER is going to see its budget increase.
I would appreciate it if you would focus on arguments instead of insulting the dead guy. Buzzard? Really?
I have read a bit about those experimental and theoretical results. Bussard & co seemd to think that they did not apply. Different plasma types and such. I know enough about the theoretical results to say they could easily be wrong - didn't you just say that plasma physics is learning new things all the time? The experimental results concern me - but again, the Polywell research is constantly being reviewed by independent physicists, and if it looks like it's not panning out, it will be canned. It's been running several years now, and still going. So... maybe the experimental results really didn't apply?
Bussard was a nuclear physicist. This was not outside his field, it WAS his field. He worked on Tokamaks long before he began his adventures into electrostatic (electrodynamic? polywell is weird) fusion.
I don't 'believe' that Polywell will work. I think it's worth investigating, and the US navy is doing so. I am satisfied. They will decide if it works or not, and I will accept their conclusion. I am NOT a nuclear physicist, and do not pretend to be one.
But I have read enough, from Bussard and others, to doubt Tokamaks. They have not yet reached ignition, producing more heat than it took to start the reaction - they cannot run on their own. ITER is _supposed_ to do so, but then they expect it to fail in short order because (as you just said) the materials science is not good enough to resist the effects of radiation bombardment on the structure. It's insanely expensive, and has been '20 years away' for longer than I've been alive.
Oh, one other comment about the JET test. It produced a pretty high peak output power, yes. But what was the percentage of input power? According to Wikipedia, it was about 65% of input. The reaction was nowhere near ignition.
What a con man Robert Bussard was! He only spent most of his life working for NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission. Clearly he didn't know what he was doing, and only tried to make huge amounts of money from the government. Which is why he died broke and still looking for funding for his project. Weird how even after he died, the US navy picked the project up and is still working on it - with regular reviews by independent physicists.
The Polywell has taken something like 20M USD in its entire history, where ITER is supposed to cost about 20 billion. Funny how no Tokamak has managed to sustain ignition, or survive it's own radiation flux.
Polywell might not work, but Tokamaks don't, either.
Really? Fuck that noise. Intent matters. This was not a man trying to crash vital infrastructure. This was a guy who wanted to release a bunch of public domain articles into the public domain.
I think you're a little off base, myself. I'm unhappy he killed himself, but I'm not particularly unhappy at all that he committed acts that were probably illegal. Illegal does not automatically mean wrong, and in this case I really don't think he was doing anything that deserved prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again it must be pointed out that preventing the brain from degrading is a HUGE focus of projects like these. Because yeah, if everybody goes senile at 80 it's not much good for the bodies to live to 200. We know. It's part of the goal.
And what, just because people don't follow the best practices for living as long as possible, they don't deserve to live longer? Fuck that. And here you were just talking about how quality of life and length of life were two completely different things.
You're missing the point. I'm not arguing about whether we _can_ improve life expectancy. I'm saying that if we do, it won't be by tacking on miserable years. In order to make you live longer, we need to fix the things that are killing you. Stuff like failing organs, where the effects are compounded (Bad kidneys? Now every other organ is swimming in ammonia. Bad liver? Your blood is full of methanol and other toxins...). And yeah, the toughest bit will probably be in trying to figure out how to keep our brains working. But if we do manage to fix these things, you won't be bedridden for fifty years. You'll be happy and mobile.
You seem to think that we're discussing more stopgap measures, like blood filtering after kidneys fail, or drugs that reduce the risk of cardiac arrest long enough for the patients liver to fail instead. No. We want to slap new organs in there, or find drugs that will prevent the failure to start with.
Thank you. I'm always confused by the idiots in threads like this that immediately start talking about how horrible it would be, with an extra forty or fifty years of suffering. That's not how it works! You're suffering and miserable at the end of your life because there's a bunch of stuff killing you.
I generally consider Aubrey de Grey a quack, and hate that he's the face of the longevity movement (I suspect it's just the mind-blowing beard). But there is one thing he said that I really like. To paraphrase, if you ask people if they want an extra forty years of life, a lot will say no. If you ask instead if they want to keep the body of a thirty year old until they're eighty, with the consequence that they live an extra forty years, they almost all say yes.
Or, like I said - paint. Which is what they do for diving weights, and works just fine.
Like paint.
Lead is toxic. Very toxic, even. But as a bulk metal it just doesn't spread enough to be very worrying.
You're the only person I've ever heard this particular version of events from. Could you give me some sources on this 'blocking?'
But they didn't! The damn plant had another safety shutdown because the reactor vessel was corroded to hell. I happened in 2009 and lasted over a year. Worldwide shortage of medical isotopes because *nobody had prepared for another shutdown.*
And as a point of interest, according to the safety commissioner, the risk was pegged at 1 in 1000. Which is pretty damn far away from the one in a million standard.
Maybe. I think that might be debatable - some people have raised what I think are valid points about the practicality of any proposed rescue scenario. There are some situations that are simply not survivable, or require so many things to go right that the risk to others is not justifiable. I don't know what the managers were actually thinking, so I cannot say if they were reasoning that there was simply no point in checking for damage, or if they were just ignoring a potentially dangerous situation.
But that's the point. It's the regulator's job to enforce the standards. The government cannot say "well, we're going to make an exception here. And here. Oh, and over there too." I realize the dilemma as far as probable harm to humans goes, but there's a huge risk in the downward slide of standards. This plant can't go offline because we'd have an isotope shortage, these ones cannot go offline because there'd be a power shortage. So exception after exception is made until you end up with a reactor that is blatantly unsafe.
I used to really love nuclear power. I believed that a safe plant was simply a matter of good design and good regulatory structure.
Then came the safety shutdown of the medical isotope reactor at Chalk River. "Good!" I thought. "The system works just like it should." The pressure started mounting because of the shortage. The safety commissioner refused to reopen the plant, and the pressure got worse. Then the government fired her and ordered the plant open again.
Nuclear plants are great, until the time comes when closing them is just too expensive. Then the government changes from engineering them to be safe to legislating them to be safe. Because nature is bound to follow legislation /s
No, it's pragmatism. The safety margins are set quite high during design, and in reality you start encroaching on those margins. That's part of the reason they're there - they save you from disaster when reality does something unexpected. In this case, it wasn't enough. And in the case of Challenger that wasn't enough. I'm not saying that they handled these strikes well, I'm saying that the guys in charge were not sociopaths or risking people's lives for the hell of it. They were humans, and they made mistakes that cost people dearly and I think that they are all very aware of that fact.
Sure, NASA's got problems. But have you ever worked in any kind of engineering position? "I've got concerns about this" Is something you hear a hundred times a day. And yeah, maybe the managers didn't understand things well enough to be able to tell which concerns were important and which were minor. But do you think that they said to themselves, "Well this might kill people, but that's a risk I'm willing to take?"
On orbit repair sounds great, except that building all the hardware is more expensive than just letting the shuttle burn up and riding back down on a soyuz.
And Orion is just stupid through and through. It's a rocket designed by politics with requirements changing every couple years. That's not really NASA's fault.
Fuck you. I don't normally go for insults, I like reasoned discussion. But fuck you if you think that the engineers and managers involved in the disaster weren't devastated. They made a choice, and it was the wrong choice. But you don't know jack shit about what went into that choice. How many times had there been foam strikes with no damage? How many times had they sacrificed part of the mission to do inspection, only to find no damage?
Except that is what they do. The scientists do some base trials so they know they're not giving you something that's stupidly toxic, then they sign up enough people who are similar enough in symptoms that the results can actually be analyzed, then they give them to you and hope you don't die. If the drug is awesomely good, they end the trial early and give it to more people.
If you just give people drugs randomly, cost doesn't go down. All that happens is that you stop being able to track how effective the drug candidates are, and have lots of people dead from drinking toxic snake oil.
And you've proved you are either a troll or an idiot. Good job!
Not Really. We can make self-replicating amino-acid chains [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8700225 ], and we can make amino acids themselves through electrical discharges (ie. lightning) into common compounds. The two occurring together might be low probability, but hardly impossible.
To dig into your 'distinction' a bit - Are viruses alive? They have none of the machinery required to 'live.' No way to move, no way to generate energy, no way to reproduce. Yet they evolve and adapt, features we normally would limit to living creatures. Or Prions, misfolded proteins. They have no machinery at all, simply acting as a catalyst to misfold other proteins. Yet they reproduce.
There really isn't a difference in kind between 'alive' things and 'collections of matter.'
Muscles are not magical energy conversion systems, they are composed of complicated proteins that bend and twist and contract, driven by chemical reactions that are well known. We can make the same reactions happen with artificial proteins, no problem.
Cells are not magical 'alive' packages, they are sacks of dirty water contained in a lipid bilayer. Something we can make with a syringe of oil and a bucket of water.
'Alive' is shorthand for 'complicated.' But science is pretty clear about what's happening.
You called him Buzzard. That's a heck of a typo if you were not trying to be insulting. Saying it's against the theory and experiment is fine, and I gave you my reply to that.
Polywell has had several reviews, though we don't know the specifics. If I remember correctly, the project is only funded on a year-to-year basis, so the navy must think they're on to _something_. I wish that the results were public! Then we'd actually have something to argue over.
I'm a little bit surprised that you consider General Fusion to be even a Dark Horse. I cannot say anything about the fusion reaction, but the mechanical engineering would be a true nightmare.
That's fine. I didn't say 'defund ITER,' the materials science and plasma research IS valuable. What you said was 'defund Polywell and focus fusion' when they are taking a tiny portion of the funding pie. And like you said, if you kill those, it's not like ITER is going to see its budget increase.
I would appreciate it if you would focus on arguments instead of insulting the dead guy. Buzzard? Really?
I have read a bit about those experimental and theoretical results. Bussard & co seemd to think that they did not apply. Different plasma types and such. I know enough about the theoretical results to say they could easily be wrong - didn't you just say that plasma physics is learning new things all the time? The experimental results concern me - but again, the Polywell research is constantly being reviewed by independent physicists, and if it looks like it's not panning out, it will be canned. It's been running several years now, and still going. So... maybe the experimental results really didn't apply?
As an aside: you want AWESOME ridiculous fusion? Look up these guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion :P
I don't think it will work, but I WANT it to work
Bussard was a nuclear physicist. This was not outside his field, it WAS his field. He worked on Tokamaks long before he began his adventures into electrostatic (electrodynamic? polywell is weird) fusion.
I don't 'believe' that Polywell will work. I think it's worth investigating, and the US navy is doing so. I am satisfied. They will decide if it works or not, and I will accept their conclusion. I am NOT a nuclear physicist, and do not pretend to be one.
But I have read enough, from Bussard and others, to doubt Tokamaks. They have not yet reached ignition, producing more heat than it took to start the reaction - they cannot run on their own. ITER is _supposed_ to do so, but then they expect it to fail in short order because (as you just said) the materials science is not good enough to resist the effects of radiation bombardment on the structure. It's insanely expensive, and has been '20 years away' for longer than I've been alive.
Oh, one other comment about the JET test. It produced a pretty high peak output power, yes. But what was the percentage of input power? According to Wikipedia, it was about 65% of input. The reaction was nowhere near ignition.
What a con man Robert Bussard was! He only spent most of his life working for NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission. Clearly he didn't know what he was doing, and only tried to make huge amounts of money from the government. Which is why he died broke and still looking for funding for his project. Weird how even after he died, the US navy picked the project up and is still working on it - with regular reviews by independent physicists.
The Polywell has taken something like 20M USD in its entire history, where ITER is supposed to cost about 20 billion. Funny how no Tokamak has managed to sustain ignition, or survive it's own radiation flux.
Polywell might not work, but Tokamaks don't, either.
I am not talking about legality. Like I said in my original post: Yes, it was illegal. No, it was not wrong.
Really? Fuck that noise. Intent matters. This was not a man trying to crash vital infrastructure. This was a guy who wanted to release a bunch of public domain articles into the public domain.
I think you're a little off base, myself. I'm unhappy he killed himself, but I'm not particularly unhappy at all that he committed acts that were probably illegal. Illegal does not automatically mean wrong, and in this case I really don't think he was doing anything that deserved prosecution.