Is he though? Or is he using that equipment to test new drilling head technologies, which is really the only part that would need to change at the developmental/testing stage?
It might also have something to do with the fact that he's doing interesting things, pushing technological boundaries on all fronts, rather than just skimming the profitable business away from the postal service.
Not that he's doing anything profoundly new, technologically, but he's putting the pieces together into much more practical cost-effective arrangements.
>Probably for the free publicity that this novelty will generate.
Perhaps. But standardized concrete construction blocks have a LOT of uses (I'm assuming a boring drill can't carve out nice big LEGO blocks from raw stone...). And with the right mobile casting equipment, hauling construction blocks out of a tunnel would be a LOT more profitable than hauling out rubble. And if he gets his machines digging as fast as he would like it could actually make sense to do so. Bonus points if the blocks meet the requirements for lining the tunnels so that a percentage can be used in-place and avoid having to haul in outside construction materials.
Plus if you look at Musk's first love - i.e. what he did when he first came into ridiculous wealth, and basically gambled all that wealth on at least once, you've got SpaceX. He's a geek that wants to live on Mars, at least part time, and basically all of his projects can be seen in that light. Maybe that's just coincidence, but:
SpaceX - get there (and do so economically). Tesla Motors - you won't find gas-powered cars on Mars, you need free oxygen for that. Boring Company - underground is the ideal place for early space colonies - you need several meters of rock to get the 14psi of radiation shielding we're used to here on Earth, and a fast tunnel-boring machine would make that a LOT easier than trying to bury structures on the surface.
And now giant rock-LEGOs - if they can be produced easily enough they would be very handy for extending underground structures onto the surface in a location still largely devoid of industrial infrastructure.
>You'd need another word. Why? We have no idea if "feelings" are also something that atoms have. Or rocks. Suppose for one whimsical moment that a rock possesses conscious awareness of a level similar to a human mind - how could we possibly know? It's not capable of action, and thus we would have no way to recognize its awareness, but that would not make it any less aware.
> it's definitional in fact: every known instance of consciousness is biological and requires collections of neurons False: plants appear to demonstrate at least limited consciousness, provided you watch them in time-lapse to compensate for their much slower movement. And they possess no neurons, though they do possess networks of electrically active cells that might serve a similar purpose, especially in their root tips, where they concentrate into clusters individually comparable to a worm's brain.
And, as I alluded in my first response "every known instance of consciousness" is inherently limited by our extremely restricted realm of perception, and we cannot make sound extrapolations from a position of ignorance. If we were telepathic we might discover that we could in fact have deeply engaging conversations with trees and rocks. I rather doubt it, I suspect any such awareness would be deeply alien to the point having nothing meaningful to say to one another beyond perhaps appreciating the weather.
>. This is what we know to be true; and it's all we have seen thus far.
That's just it - we don't *know* that, we only *assume* it. We have literally no evidence to support the idea that fundamental particles have or lack awareness. Just our assumptions based on our extremely limited realm of experience.
>The claim you are making is that awareness can arise directly from the inanimate No, I'm saying that if A is made of B, and B is made of C, then logically A is made of C.
I'm also not saying that rocks etc. are aware - if atoms are, then they might be, but there's no reason to assume that either. Is a group of people meaningfully aware in its own right? And for that matter we have zero evidence as to the awareness of rocks as well - so long as we cannot detect awareness directly, and only via the demonstration of behaviors that we associate with awareness in humans, we are literally incapable of making any well-founded claims about the (non)awareness of anything that's physically incapable of demonstrating those kinds of behaviors.
Doesn't matter. Brains are made of atoms - if we assume that atoms are inanimate (purely mechanistic, with no awareness), then it follows that awareness must somehow arise from the inanimate.
*Statistically* particles are easy to predict en-mass - so are humans for that matter. But it's virtually impossible to do so with individuals of either sort.
I'm not saying that they don't do anything that would demonstrate choice - just that it would be very difficult for us to recognize it since we already KNOW that they exist in a realm that's largely invisible to us, and fundamentally alien to our experience. Hell, I can't think of anyone who has even bothered to look for hints of such a thing. And that's rather the point - when we assume we know how things work, we stop looking for alternatives.
And awareness is NOT a concept that we dreamed up, any more than "red" is. We made up the label, and set the limits on what it applies to, but the underlying property exists independent of our labels. It makes no difference if something demonstrates awareness in a way we can recognize, it's awareness exists independently of our labeling it as such.
Filed right alongside your evidence that they are NOT aware, a few aisles over from your evidence that awareness can arise from the interactions of completely inanimate substance.
If fundamental particles are truly inanimate, wouldn't you expect them to behave in a predictable fashion even on an individual basis? QM threw that out the window a long time ago.
>If an entity demonstrates perception of it's environment, the ability to process that information, and the ability to store and recall that information, then it is aware
So I assume by your definition you consider a self-driving car, or even a pick-and-place machine to be meaningfully aware? I can work with that if so. But, that definition breaks down completely when we get into judging the realm of things that exist in fundamentally different environments. An amoeba appears aware because it acts in ways we can readily perceive. A plant on the other hand mostly acts far more subtly, though time-lapse photography can reveal apparently intentional activity. But what about an electron? It exists in a fundamentally different realm that we can only dimly perceive the rough boundaries of - how could we begin to determine if quantum non-determinism is a manifestation of random chance, or intentional choice?
It's not that I don't believe awareness can't be tested for, just that we don't know how to do so in any manner that's not more far indicative of our own perceptual biases than any objective reality.
>Particles cannot perceive. They cannot process. They cannot store, or retrieve. All they can do is interact with each other.
Of course particles can "perceive" - they respond to outside forces all the time, just as our eyes, ears, etc. do. And we know for a fact that past interactions can influence future ones, so they clearly store and retrieve at least a limited amount of information. As for processing - I can't imagine how we'd even recognize the results of that, so you can hardly say it doesn't do so - just that you can't imagine *how* it would do so. But the universe is famously unrestrained by the limits of our imaginations.
And no, it doesn't render the term meaningless, it just fundamentally alters how you consider it's relevance. For example, there's no reason to assume that a rock possesses its own awareness just because its constituent atoms might be - just as there's no reason to assume an ant colony or human society possesses awareness just because the individuals within them do. Awareness then might refers to the levels at which a general component awareness is structured into something that is aware in its own right.
Is it truly any less magical to imagine that awareness somehow spontaneously arises from wholly inanimate mechanical interactions?
Energy, yes - electromagnetic, not so much. Electrostatics is largely responsible for making atoms behave as though they're solid, but below that level you get into more exotic forces.
Well, at least all the hard work except continuing to endure be mildly poisoned by toxic drugs.
But yeah - laziness and procrastination is probably well into the top 10 fundamental motivating forces in human behavior. Overcome that and you're well on the way to letting enlightened self-interest do the rest.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising. It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not. If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"? It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
There's plenty of new-age nutters out there, but would you honestly expect someone describing something completely outside your realm of experience or understanding to sound like anything other than nonsense?
Or maybe it's entirely contained in the intensely personal network of interconnection between our neurons, and possibly to some extent in the internal state of the neurons themselves (RNA, etc). Certainly we have managed to revive people whose brains have been almost totally inert.
The mechanism underlying awareness is still completely unresolved.
There is an alternative to the problem matter producing awareness: awareness might be an inherent property of matter. I don't imagine an atom or electron has a particularly sophisticated awareness, but if it has even the smallest fleck of "I am!" to build upon, then it fundamantally changes the nature of the questions we should be asking.
In that case the awareness of an organism need not be a is not a fundamentally new feature, but an emergent structure from the interactions of more primitive consciousnesses. Much as the life of an organism emerges from the structured functioning of the life of its cells. Or the wisdom of crowds (and insanity of mobs) emerges from the interaction of large groups of people.
True, but there is no stable balance point - the rates are always changing along with solar activity and the Earth's magnetic field - neither of which are themselves stable. So the real question is, is any change large enough to make a noticeable difference before the sun expands to consume the Earth anyway?
There IS drag certainly, as intermolecular collisions create fluid boundary layers as it moves past a solid (or vice-versa). But a beanstalk is stationary - any drag effects will be slowing down the wind, lowering the kinetic energies of the molecules and tending to cause them to fall lower into the atmosphere.
I'm pretty sure gases don't exhibit surface tension to any appreciable amount - gas molecules have only a very weak attractive force between them, which is why they can change volume so readily. There's no surface to the Earth's atmosphere, it just gradually diffuses into vacuum, with the outermost molecules occasionally gaining enough momentum in a collision to achieve escape velocity.
Still "very weak" is not "none", so it would be something to keep an eye on, just in case. But capillary doesn't suck fluids up up so much as give them a lattice to climb themselves, and the height they can climb is a combination of the pressure supporting them from below, with the attraction to the dissimilar molecules above. It can only climb so high, and even a hundred miles of additional altitude would make very little difference - a molecule that broke free from the wall would be traveling far below orbital speed, and immediately plunge back to Earth. You'd need to get capillary action to a substantial fraction of the 22,000 miles to geostationary before an escaping molecule would have a chance of maintaining orbit.
Only beanstalks - there are many other kinds of space elevators that would be much less challenging and dangerous.
Is it still a hole if you have a space elevator plugging it?
I've never heard of air flowing along solids more freely than it moves on its own - air molecules are escaping into orbit constantly.
Why would the Earth's orbit change noticeably? Any electromagnetic forces should average out - whatever forces the cable experiences as it moves away from the sun will be balanced by those it experiences ~12 hours later when it's moving back towards the sun in an exact mirror image of its earlier motion.
Why would it effect the moon? The moon has an extremely weak magnetic field - plus the same arguments as for the sun. Plus, the moon is already escaping Earth, it'd take some phenomenal magnetic forces to overcome the tidal forces pushing it away and reverse its direction
Absolutely a huge risk though - even flawless carbon nanotubes would only offer a tiny safety margin, and no respectable engineer would sign off on a project like that.
Only the "beanstalk style", there's lots of orbital alternatives. Not quite so convenient to get on, but something like a "space wheel" is a lot easier to build and has its own benefits (e.g. 100% efficient and no moving parts)
Slashdot Mirror
Is he though? Or is he using that equipment to test new drilling head technologies, which is really the only part that would need to change at the developmental/testing stage?
It might also have something to do with the fact that he's doing interesting things, pushing technological boundaries on all fronts, rather than just skimming the profitable business away from the postal service.
Not that he's doing anything profoundly new, technologically, but he's putting the pieces together into much more practical cost-effective arrangements.
>Probably for the free publicity that this novelty will generate.
Perhaps. But standardized concrete construction blocks have a LOT of uses (I'm assuming a boring drill can't carve out nice big LEGO blocks from raw stone...). And with the right mobile casting equipment, hauling construction blocks out of a tunnel would be a LOT more profitable than hauling out rubble. And if he gets his machines digging as fast as he would like it could actually make sense to do so. Bonus points if the blocks meet the requirements for lining the tunnels so that a percentage can be used in-place and avoid having to haul in outside construction materials.
Plus if you look at Musk's first love - i.e. what he did when he first came into ridiculous wealth, and basically gambled all that wealth on at least once, you've got SpaceX. He's a geek that wants to live on Mars, at least part time, and basically all of his projects can be seen in that light. Maybe that's just coincidence, but:
SpaceX - get there (and do so economically).
Tesla Motors - you won't find gas-powered cars on Mars, you need free oxygen for that.
Boring Company - underground is the ideal place for early space colonies - you need several meters of rock to get the 14psi of radiation shielding we're used to here on Earth, and a fast tunnel-boring machine would make that a LOT easier than trying to bury structures on the surface.
And now giant rock-LEGOs - if they can be produced easily enough they would be very handy for extending underground structures onto the surface in a location still largely devoid of industrial infrastructure.
>You'd need another word.
Why? We have no idea if "feelings" are also something that atoms have. Or rocks. Suppose for one whimsical moment that a rock possesses conscious awareness of a level similar to a human mind - how could we possibly know? It's not capable of action, and thus we would have no way to recognize its awareness, but that would not make it any less aware.
> it's definitional in fact: every known instance of consciousness is biological and requires collections of neurons
False: plants appear to demonstrate at least limited consciousness, provided you watch them in time-lapse to compensate for their much slower movement. And they possess no neurons, though they do possess networks of electrically active cells that might serve a similar purpose, especially in their root tips, where they concentrate into clusters individually comparable to a worm's brain.
And, as I alluded in my first response "every known instance of consciousness" is inherently limited by our extremely restricted realm of perception, and we cannot make sound extrapolations from a position of ignorance. If we were telepathic we might discover that we could in fact have deeply engaging conversations with trees and rocks. I rather doubt it, I suspect any such awareness would be deeply alien to the point having nothing meaningful to say to one another beyond perhaps appreciating the weather.
>. This is what we know to be true; and it's all we have seen thus far.
That's just it - we don't *know* that, we only *assume* it. We have literally no evidence to support the idea that fundamental particles have or lack awareness. Just our assumptions based on our extremely limited realm of experience.
>The claim you are making is that awareness can arise directly from the inanimate
No, I'm saying that if A is made of B, and B is made of C, then logically A is made of C.
I'm also not saying that rocks etc. are aware - if atoms are, then they might be, but there's no reason to assume that either. Is a group of people meaningfully aware in its own right? And for that matter we have zero evidence as to the awareness of rocks as well - so long as we cannot detect awareness directly, and only via the demonstration of behaviors that we associate with awareness in humans, we are literally incapable of making any well-founded claims about the (non)awareness of anything that's physically incapable of demonstrating those kinds of behaviors.
Doesn't matter. Brains are made of atoms - if we assume that atoms are inanimate (purely mechanistic, with no awareness), then it follows that awareness must somehow arise from the inanimate.
*Statistically* particles are easy to predict en-mass - so are humans for that matter. But it's virtually impossible to do so with individuals of either sort.
I'm not saying that they don't do anything that would demonstrate choice - just that it would be very difficult for us to recognize it since we already KNOW that they exist in a realm that's largely invisible to us, and fundamentally alien to our experience. Hell, I can't think of anyone who has even bothered to look for hints of such a thing. And that's rather the point - when we assume we know how things work, we stop looking for alternatives.
And awareness is NOT a concept that we dreamed up, any more than "red" is. We made up the label, and set the limits on what it applies to, but the underlying property exists independent of our labels. It makes no difference if something demonstrates awareness in a way we can recognize, it's awareness exists independently of our labeling it as such.
Filed right alongside your evidence that they are NOT aware, a few aisles over from your evidence that awareness can arise from the interactions of completely inanimate substance.
If fundamental particles are truly inanimate, wouldn't you expect them to behave in a predictable fashion even on an individual basis? QM threw that out the window a long time ago.
>If an entity demonstrates perception of it's environment, the ability to process that information, and the ability to store and recall that information, then it is aware
So I assume by your definition you consider a self-driving car, or even a pick-and-place machine to be meaningfully aware? I can work with that if so. But, that definition breaks down completely when we get into judging the realm of things that exist in fundamentally different environments. An amoeba appears aware because it acts in ways we can readily perceive. A plant on the other hand mostly acts far more subtly, though time-lapse photography can reveal apparently intentional activity. But what about an electron? It exists in a fundamentally different realm that we can only dimly perceive the rough boundaries of - how could we begin to determine if quantum non-determinism is a manifestation of random chance, or intentional choice?
It's not that I don't believe awareness can't be tested for, just that we don't know how to do so in any manner that's not more far indicative of our own perceptual biases than any objective reality.
>Particles cannot perceive. They cannot process. They cannot store, or retrieve. All they can do is interact with each other.
Of course particles can "perceive" - they respond to outside forces all the time, just as our eyes, ears, etc. do. And we know for a fact that past interactions can influence future ones, so they clearly store and retrieve at least a limited amount of information. As for processing - I can't imagine how we'd even recognize the results of that, so you can hardly say it doesn't do so - just that you can't imagine *how* it would do so. But the universe is famously unrestrained by the limits of our imaginations.
And no, it doesn't render the term meaningless, it just fundamentally alters how you consider it's relevance. For example, there's no reason to assume that a rock possesses its own awareness just because its constituent atoms might be - just as there's no reason to assume an ant colony or human society possesses awareness just because the individuals within them do. Awareness then might refers to the levels at which a general component awareness is structured into something that is aware in its own right.
Is it truly any less magical to imagine that awareness somehow spontaneously arises from wholly inanimate mechanical interactions?
Energy, yes - electromagnetic, not so much. Electrostatics is largely responsible for making atoms behave as though they're solid, but below that level you get into more exotic forces.
>That there's also a public benefit in reducing the spread of antibiotic resistant diseases is important to us, but maybe not so much to them.
Pretty important to them too - if they become an incubator for antibiotic resistant TB then that relapse is going to be a lot more unpleasant.
Well, at least all the hard work except continuing to endure be mildly poisoned by toxic drugs.
But yeah - laziness and procrastination is probably well into the top 10 fundamental motivating forces in human behavior. Overcome that and you're well on the way to letting enlightened self-interest do the rest.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising. It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not. If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"? It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
The population of horses and mules - laborers who had little to offer beyond brute strength.
Does anyone really think Apple's goal is anything other than getting them hooked on their brand of opaque "computing appliance" at a young age?
There's plenty of new-age nutters out there, but would you honestly expect someone describing something completely outside your realm of experience or understanding to sound like anything other than nonsense?
Or maybe it's entirely contained in the intensely personal network of interconnection between our neurons, and possibly to some extent in the internal state of the neurons themselves (RNA, etc). Certainly we have managed to revive people whose brains have been almost totally inert.
The mechanism underlying awareness is still completely unresolved.
There is an alternative to the problem matter producing awareness: awareness might be an inherent property of matter. I don't imagine an atom or electron has a particularly sophisticated awareness, but if it has even the smallest fleck of "I am!" to build upon, then it fundamantally changes the nature of the questions we should be asking.
In that case the awareness of an organism need not be a is not a fundamentally new feature, but an emergent structure from the interactions of more primitive consciousnesses. Much as the life of an organism emerges from the structured functioning of the life of its cells. Or the wisdom of crowds (and insanity of mobs) emerges from the interaction of large groups of people.
True, but there is no stable balance point - the rates are always changing along with solar activity and the Earth's magnetic field - neither of which are themselves stable. So the real question is, is any change large enough to make a noticeable difference before the sun expands to consume the Earth anyway?
There IS drag certainly, as intermolecular collisions create fluid boundary layers as it moves past a solid (or vice-versa). But a beanstalk is stationary - any drag effects will be slowing down the wind, lowering the kinetic energies of the molecules and tending to cause them to fall lower into the atmosphere.
I'm pretty sure gases don't exhibit surface tension to any appreciable amount - gas molecules have only a very weak attractive force between them, which is why they can change volume so readily. There's no surface to the Earth's atmosphere, it just gradually diffuses into vacuum, with the outermost molecules occasionally gaining enough momentum in a collision to achieve escape velocity.
Still "very weak" is not "none", so it would be something to keep an eye on, just in case. But capillary doesn't suck fluids up up so much as give them a lattice to climb themselves, and the height they can climb is a combination of the pressure supporting them from below, with the attraction to the dissimilar molecules above. It can only climb so high, and even a hundred miles of additional altitude would make very little difference - a molecule that broke free from the wall would be traveling far below orbital speed, and immediately plunge back to Earth. You'd need to get capillary action to a substantial fraction of the 22,000 miles to geostationary before an escaping molecule would have a chance of maintaining orbit.
But it's fighting gravity more intensely - when it leans over it starts getting some aerodynamic lift as well.
You're thinking of the ozone, not the ionosphere. I didn't notice any mention of it being disrupted to anything like the same extent.
Only beanstalks - there are many other kinds of space elevators that would be much less challenging and dangerous.
Is it still a hole if you have a space elevator plugging it?
I've never heard of air flowing along solids more freely than it moves on its own - air molecules are escaping into orbit constantly.
Why would the Earth's orbit change noticeably? Any electromagnetic forces should average out - whatever forces the cable experiences as it moves away from the sun will be balanced by those it experiences ~12 hours later when it's moving back towards the sun in an exact mirror image of its earlier motion.
Why would it effect the moon? The moon has an extremely weak magnetic field - plus the same arguments as for the sun. Plus, the moon is already escaping Earth, it'd take some phenomenal magnetic forces to overcome the tidal forces pushing it away and reverse its direction
Absolutely a huge risk though - even flawless carbon nanotubes would only offer a tiny safety margin, and no respectable engineer would sign off on a project like that.
Actually, the F9 burns LOX and kerosene (RP-1, that is Refined Petroluem-1). It's the new Raptor engine, for the BFR, that burns methane.
Only the "beanstalk style", there's lots of orbital alternatives. Not quite so convenient to get on, but something like a "space wheel" is a lot easier to build and has its own benefits (e.g. 100% efficient and no moving parts)