The basic fact though is that there will *never* be an AI (uploaded or otherwise, it's now artificial) that "has died a few times" - at most you'll get an AI that has watched its own mind-clones die.
Ask yourself this - if you had a transporter accident today that made two identical copies, and "non-duplicate law" required one of you be immediately killed, would it matter to you whether it was you who died, or the duplicate looking at you from across the room? I'm willing to bet it would - from the moment you were duplicated you become two independent people - one of you will walk out of that room and resume the life you both remember having, and the other will experience the discomfort and dissolution of death.
Similarly with parents - I doubt there has *ever* been a parent that is actually okay with dying to save their child - only parents that find the prospect of dying less terrifying/distressing than that of letting their child die. I.e. they're choosing the less bad of two very bad options.
And Net Neutrality laws were passed in response to ISPs beginning to implement censorship and "cost maximizing" shenanigans. Do you really think they'd pay to have the laws repealed if they didn't plan to resume (and expand) their exploitation?
With clocking - true, but it only makes things worse. My point is that speed and number of synapses are independent variables - Given enough data-processing speed you could simulate a mouse at real speed, or a human brain at 1/1000 speed. But there's not a neural network in the world that has been attempted on the scale of complexity of the human brain. Assuming you could accurately (enough) model a synapse at 1kHz, 100 trillion synapses * 1kHz = 100,000,000 GHz of processing power.
You *cannot* encode such timing pulses as "a number". You're talking about the precise timing and order of signals from thousands of different sources. Besides which asynchronous events are fundamentally incapable of being accurately sampled - the asynchronous universe operates with infinite clockspeed, by sampling it you're inevitably throwing most of that information away. You're also inherently throwing away most of the potential output information - a node can only "fire" during it's clock-pulse - whether it would have fired slightly before or after its cousin on the opposite side of the brain is lost, but that might be critical information to a neuron using both of those inputs to decide whether it should fire.
Those links refer to an interesting trick to expand the information content accessible to the NN - but at first glance sounds more like giving the NN an "encyclopedia" of external information to refer to, rather than making the individual nodes more intelligent.
As for your motion sensor example - it's actually not really relevant - whether you have 1 million separate circuits, or one circuit sequentially processing a million inputs, the processing potential needed is the same. And the million separate circuits will be tend to far more responsive, since they can begin to react immediately, while the clocked version will only be paying attention to those inputs 1/1,000,000 of the time (i.e. all input changes during 99.9999% of the time will be ignored, only the before and after "snapshots" are available. That's not relevant if both circuits are clocked, but immensely relevant in an asynchronous system.
Right Right - mostly. Though things like Hawking radiation can "escape", and there may be geometric oddities that allow information to escape as well Getting iffy - it's not altogether clear that the "inside" of a black hole even exists to begin with - some theories have all inflow stop at the the event horizon itself, from where it could theoretically escape. All we know about the "inside" of a black hole, is that normal physics doesn't work there. Nope - you're assuming our universe is a black hole or otherwise has an event horizon. Nope - one of the defining qualities of (many classes) of alternate universes is that they have fundamentally different physics. Nope.
Well,it depends on the *specific* multiverse theory you're referring to. There are a *lot* of different multi-universe theories, and many of them may be true simultaneously, giving rise to several fundamentally different classes of alternate universes.
Some are indeed a little "unscientific" in the sense that they could not be directly tested - such as the idea that our universe is one bubble among countless that formed during the inflationary phase of the universe, in which case (barring FTL) we can never contact any others, because we're all sharing the same coordinate system, and the boundaries of all our universes are expanding at almost lightspeed, while the space between them is still inflationary and expanding much faster than light. We could however conceivably create a "child universe" based on the same principles - though doing so would essentially create a new big bang, destroying everything in the observable universe as the new one expanded at light speed converting false-vacuum to new mass-energy. There's also the possibility that we could detect the "fingerprints" of early shockwaves within such a primordial bubble universe, which would validate the theory, but not provide any mechanism for inter-universe contact. I.E. the theory could be validated, but still be useless.
Many other theories postulate that our 4-dimensional universe is embedded in a multi-verse with a higher-order geometry, and that other universes (4-D or otherwise) are likewise embedded. Picture many sheets of infinitely thin paper floating in a pond as an analog for 2D universes in a 3D multiverse. In which case contact between such universes are theoretically possible if we could figure out a way to send signals in directions we're not yet aware of. Impossible to test today, but not fundamentally unscientific. And unlike universes which exist within the same 4D-space as ours and thus must lie somewhere beyond the bounds of the observable universe, parallel universes might be arbitrarily close. In fact, there's currently work being done to look for evidence of our universe colliding with others - an event which could occur anywhere in our universe since unlike the edges of a bubble universe, higher-order edges are omni-present.
Indeed, and they do seem to show greater promise, though by the same token I suspect that they're less dependable/predictable.
Give them fully asynchronous nodes, the ability to arbitrarily reconfigure their connections, and probably some much more sophisticated training logic, and I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing things emerge that at least vaguely resemble a mind. At least after scaling up a thousandfold beyond existing networks, into the realm of the hundreds of trillions of synapses in the human brain.
Shaping that potential into something coherent, that demonstrates motives and goals, may prove to be an even greater challenge - an awful lot of organic wiring structure seems to be governed by millions of years of emergent growth patterns. We may be able to "cheat" and use detailed brain scans to "jump start" an AI by duplicating a human brain network. Maybe. But frankly even if it were successful that seems like it has a lot of potential to go horribly wrong - all the irrationality of a human brain, with none of the biological drives or constraints it developed in response to.
Operations per second will only give you information processing speed though, not complexity of "thought". If you sped up a mouse's brain a thousandfold you wouldn't get a human-level intelligence, you'd just get a very fast-thinking mouse.
Also, organic neurons may "fire" at around 1 kHz frequency, but unlike a clocked NN node, they're asynchronous and use the timing of of incoming pulses to decide when and whether they should fire, as they posses both internal memory and information processing ability - unlike the "dumb switches" in a NN
As for duplicated circuitry - given the enormous metabolic costs of a brain, there's probably very little actual duplication being done. For example, the brain probably doesn't process images from each eye independently, but instead integrates both inputs and processes them together (as a supporting example, each hemisphere doesn't get input from one eye, but instead corresponding half-views from both eyes)
Not at all - we have countless billions of examples of electro-chemical general-purpose "strong" intelligences wandering the planet proving that it can be done. The only question is if they can be recreated using current hardware and techniques. Personally I suspect one of the biggest shortcoming of current "deep learning" strategies is the layered design - organic brains are a jumbled mess of interconnected neurons with an enormous amount of feedback. Without feedback you can't even create standing waves, which provide one of the few clues we have into how organic brains function.
Probably even more significant than the "neuron" shortcomings, are the architectural ones.
AI neural networks are generally arranged in layers - feed one layer the raw input, then use its output as the input to layer 2, whose output is used as the input to layer 3, and so on and so forth through as many layers as you want/need to get the outputs you desire.
Contrast that to an organic brain, where everything is a jumbled interconnected mess with lots of feedback. Considering the incredible power of feedback in even simple electronic and mechanical systems, expecting a layered neural network to behave even remotely similarly to an organic brain is ludicrous.
Of course the catch is that the singularity has nothing to do with human immortality.
Biological immortality is likely to be both an extremely difficult challenge, and rather uninteresting to synthetic minds.
And even if AI hardware is capable of hosting an "uploaded" human mind intact - that doesn't do anything for *you*. Having an immortal mind-twin is unlikely to make you feel any better about your own impending demise - and that's assuming they wouldn't have to kill you in order to map your brain in the first place.
A strong claim. How exactly do you measure the distance between existing AI and strong AI, before strong AI is developed?
Personally, I suspect that once strong AI is developed, there's a fair chance we'll see modern "neural" networks as a step in the right direction. After all we know the basic strategy is sound - a much more sophisticated version of it is driving our own minds.
For comparison though - In 2015 Digital Reasoning built the largest neural network in the world, at 160 billion parameters. I'm guessing a "parameter" is a weighted connection between "neurons", and thus roughly analogous to a single synapse in an organic brain, of which a human brain has 100-1000 trillion. So, even barring any "secret sauce" we haven't yet figured out in how "processing nodes" interconnect, our most advanced AIs have less than 0.1% of the processing potential of a human brain. Even a mouse brain apparently averages almost a billion synapses per mm^3, so in the neighborhood of 400 billion synapses for a common house mouse.
So, currently our most advanced AIs have only a fraction of the processing potential of a mouse brain, and that's before you even consider the fact that continuous asynchronous signalling is likely far more information-dense than a clocked AI "neural network", or the fact that individual biological neurons actually do a fair amount of internal processing and data retention, rather than being "dumb switches" as they are in modern AIs.
Really hard to tell how the software and strategies compares, when your hardware is underpowered by several orders of magnitude.
Not necessarily - we may eventually develop such an accurate model of the universe that there are no longer any measurable inconsistencies to drive further research.
At that point all that's left is engineering and "stamp collecting" - exploring and cataloging new locations, organisms, etc. And barring FTL even that will eventually become impossible as the expansion of the universe carries the last of the unexplored stars beyond the limits of the observable universe.
You have a deeply flawed understanding of both rationality and human nature. Hint, there's no such thing as a rational human - only humans that are capable of thinking (mostly) rationally when they need to. Nobody goes into science for rational reasons - the hours are long, the pay sucks, and the odds of monetizing a discovery make the lottery look like a good investment.
All astronomically accurate horoscopes are themselves completely accurate, but usually begin and end with "something will happen today"
Very occasionally they may be further clarified with some details like "A large meteor impact will ignite global firestorms and likely trigger a 'nuclear winter'", or "Much of the planet's surface will be incinerated by a nearby supernova", but those are rare enough that there weren't any (human) astronomolgers around to make the prediction last time.
Why? Last I heard diesel looks and smells worse (at least in the typical American engine), but gasoline exhaust was a significantly larger health hazard.
Machine learning isn't programming - code just provides the infrastructure. The biological analog would be claiming that because we know how individual neurons work (*) we understand everything there is to know about human intelligence. The reality is the overwhelming majority of the functionality is encoded in the network interconnections - and the AI created those on its own.
(*) we don't actually, we've barely scratched the surface.
Can you offer any reference for that claim? The *media* reported it as a failure, I don't recall ever hearing anything from the scientists in that regard, except with a bunch of qualifiers that make it clear that it only failed to reach the ideal goal - which is why they were doing the experiment in the first place.
Sure there will be - a much larger population to interact with, and a mcuh larger environment to work in. Small-group dynamics can get particularly ugly over long periods, especially with a bunch of self-important egos involved (they are scientists after all, possibly even worse than actors for large egos).
You also have the fact that your colonists will be people self-selected (and hopefully further screened) to be willing to travel to another planet on what may very well turn out to be a one-way trip, to spend the rest of their life building an offworld colony - rather than scientists willing to sacrifice face-to-face interactions with their loved ones for a couple years for the sake of their research.
The Loop plan is designed with a much larger applicability than just "to the airport" - for the airport scenario I would assume they just (mostly) just carry passenger modules instead of cars. (I assume some of the airport staff might want to bring their cars with them though)
That's the radiation exposure at the surface of the ship. Hence the "middle of a densely packed cargo ship" - the cargo doubles as radiation shielding. It only takes a few meters worth of rock-equivalent mass (14 pounds of shielding per square inch of surface) to duplicate the shielding effects of Earth's atmosphere. You don't get the benefit of the magnetosphere - but I believe that doesn't so much stop a lot of things that would otherwise reach all the way to the surface, as stop those particles from stripping away the atmosphere they would otherwise collide with.
As for nitrogen, the atmosphere is certainly a potential, if energy-intensive, source. The problem being that you really only need a comparative trickle of CO2 to offset atmosphere leakage and support ecosystem growth. Meanwhile for every kg of atmospheric CO2 you collect, you only get 20g of Nitrogen (along with 21g of Argon, 1.5g or O2, and 0.5g of CO). But perhaps you could work out some more efficient way to separate the N2 out of ambient atmosphere.
As for mechanically producing and filtering your atmosphere - there's no need and it introduces massive potential for failure, as you point out. That's a solution for when you're mass-constrained. In a colony you'd do it the same way we do it here - with plants. You're basically building one of those sealed terrarium-in-a-jar toys, just on a massive scale - rather like they did with Biosphere 2, only with no artificial requirements to be closed loop, so you can import all the water, CO2, and other useful materials you can find outside, and with complete control over the light exposure your greenhouses are getting, so that you can fine-tune photosynthesis rates as needed.
Pollution will certainly be an issue - but lots of plants are very good at filtering the air. the most important aspect will be minimizing the amount of artificial pollutants introduced - which shouldn't be too difficult, as they all have to be imported. (Industry would, I assume, operate in Martian atmosphere, possibly compressed if helpful.)
Mission 1 lasted for the full 2-year plan. They had a LOT of problems, but they persevered and completed their mission. And those problems were the whole *point* of the experiment - to find out what problems they didn't already know about. If it had gone off without a hitch then the whole experiment would have been completely useless except as "proof" that we already knew everything.
Certainly you'd prefer to have at least basic habitats in place before you land, maybe even greenhouses up and running, but after that all you really need is agriculture to survive in the short term. And it's expected that it will take years, maybe several decades, before a colony could have a good chance of survival if the shipments from Earth stopped. That's risk is inherent in the endeavor - if you're not willing to accept it, don't go. Those who don't want to put their life on the line to colonize a new world will, by necessity, have to wait until other people have built it for them, and then accept whatever vision they can buy into for it. That's how it's always been.
You know what else causes a small but permanent reduction in health? Living on Earth for a year. There's certainly room for improvement, but a solution does exist.
You seem to be assuming that being able to live on Mars means living just as long and healthily as if you had staid on Earth. Why should that be the case? Colonists have *always* seen reduced lifespans compared to those who stayed home, and especially for the early waves of colonists into such an isolated and unforgiving environment, it probably won't be gravity-related health complications that kill them.
Even if Mars gravity cuts life expectancy by maybe 20%, why is that a problem? So long as the people making the choice to move there think it's worth the risk - so be it. You could increase your lifespan considerably on Earth living in a hermetically sealed bubble and consuming only maximally nutritious/minimally unhealthy foods - but nobody considers it a problem when you decide to do enjoy life instead. And don't bother mentioning the children who didn't make the choice - you enter the world, you takes your chances. Few people are up in arms over the hundreds of millions of children born into environments right here on Earth that subject them to much worse life expectancy reductions.
So it does, I stand corrected. Though with only one engine each it probably doesn't have the potential torsion issues of a cluster of mutli-core rockets. I suspect the issue will be not so much keeping the thrust through the center of mass, the Falcons seem to have worked out pretty accurate engine throttling, as in keeping the linkage stresses within acceptable limits while avoiding (or dealing with) barrel rolls and other aerodynamic complexities of a non-cylindrical rocket.
You're quite possibly right about the N1. I thought I remembered something about ejecting engines as well, but we all know how unreliable memory is. I do recall it being used as an example of how the Falcon multi-core strategy would never work.
So I guess it's not so much doing much fundamentally new, just combining several of existing technologies into a new and hopefully more capable arrangement. I can live with that.
Though, the fact that the Delta IV Heavy managed to make it to orbit on it's maiden flight gives me more hope that Musk is intentionally underselling their chances of success.
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty on the other side as well.
The basic fact though is that there will *never* be an AI (uploaded or otherwise, it's now artificial) that "has died a few times" - at most you'll get an AI that has watched its own mind-clones die.
Ask yourself this - if you had a transporter accident today that made two identical copies, and "non-duplicate law" required one of you be immediately killed, would it matter to you whether it was you who died, or the duplicate looking at you from across the room? I'm willing to bet it would - from the moment you were duplicated you become two independent people - one of you will walk out of that room and resume the life you both remember having, and the other will experience the discomfort and dissolution of death.
Similarly with parents - I doubt there has *ever* been a parent that is actually okay with dying to save their child - only parents that find the prospect of dying less terrifying/distressing than that of letting their child die. I.e. they're choosing the less bad of two very bad options.
And Net Neutrality laws were passed in response to ISPs beginning to implement censorship and "cost maximizing" shenanigans. Do you really think they'd pay to have the laws repealed if they didn't plan to resume (and expand) their exploitation?
With clocking - true, but it only makes things worse. My point is that speed and number of synapses are independent variables - Given enough data-processing speed you could simulate a mouse at real speed, or a human brain at 1/1000 speed. But there's not a neural network in the world that has been attempted on the scale of complexity of the human brain. Assuming you could accurately (enough) model a synapse at 1kHz, 100 trillion synapses * 1kHz = 100,000,000 GHz of processing power.
You *cannot* encode such timing pulses as "a number". You're talking about the precise timing and order of signals from thousands of different sources. Besides which asynchronous events are fundamentally incapable of being accurately sampled - the asynchronous universe operates with infinite clockspeed, by sampling it you're inevitably throwing most of that information away. You're also inherently throwing away most of the potential output information - a node can only "fire" during it's clock-pulse - whether it would have fired slightly before or after its cousin on the opposite side of the brain is lost, but that might be critical information to a neuron using both of those inputs to decide whether it should fire.
Those links refer to an interesting trick to expand the information content accessible to the NN - but at first glance sounds more like giving the NN an "encyclopedia" of external information to refer to, rather than making the individual nodes more intelligent.
As for your motion sensor example - it's actually not really relevant - whether you have 1 million separate circuits, or one circuit sequentially processing a million inputs, the processing potential needed is the same. And the million separate circuits will be tend to far more responsive, since they can begin to react immediately, while the clocked version will only be paying attention to those inputs 1/1,000,000 of the time (i.e. all input changes during 99.9999% of the time will be ignored, only the before and after "snapshots" are available. That's not relevant if both circuits are clocked, but immensely relevant in an asynchronous system.
Right
Right - mostly. Though things like Hawking radiation can "escape", and there may be geometric oddities that allow information to escape as well
Getting iffy - it's not altogether clear that the "inside" of a black hole even exists to begin with - some theories have all inflow stop at the the event horizon itself, from where it could theoretically escape. All we know about the "inside" of a black hole, is that normal physics doesn't work there.
Nope - you're assuming our universe is a black hole or otherwise has an event horizon.
Nope - one of the defining qualities of (many classes) of alternate universes is that they have fundamentally different physics.
Nope.
Well,it depends on the *specific* multiverse theory you're referring to. There are a *lot* of different multi-universe theories, and many of them may be true simultaneously, giving rise to several fundamentally different classes of alternate universes.
Some are indeed a little "unscientific" in the sense that they could not be directly tested - such as the idea that our universe is one bubble among countless that formed during the inflationary phase of the universe, in which case (barring FTL) we can never contact any others, because we're all sharing the same coordinate system, and the boundaries of all our universes are expanding at almost lightspeed, while the space between them is still inflationary and expanding much faster than light. We could however conceivably create a "child universe" based on the same principles - though doing so would essentially create a new big bang, destroying everything in the observable universe as the new one expanded at light speed converting false-vacuum to new mass-energy. There's also the possibility that we could detect the "fingerprints" of early shockwaves within such a primordial bubble universe, which would validate the theory, but not provide any mechanism for inter-universe contact. I.E. the theory could be validated, but still be useless.
Many other theories postulate that our 4-dimensional universe is embedded in a multi-verse with a higher-order geometry, and that other universes (4-D or otherwise) are likewise embedded. Picture many sheets of infinitely thin paper floating in a pond as an analog for 2D universes in a 3D multiverse. In which case contact between such universes are theoretically possible if we could figure out a way to send signals in directions we're not yet aware of. Impossible to test today, but not fundamentally unscientific. And unlike universes which exist within the same 4D-space as ours and thus must lie somewhere beyond the bounds of the observable universe, parallel universes might be arbitrarily close. In fact, there's currently work being done to look for evidence of our universe colliding with others - an event which could occur anywhere in our universe since unlike the edges of a bubble universe, higher-order edges are omni-present.
Indeed, and they do seem to show greater promise, though by the same token I suspect that they're less dependable/predictable.
Give them fully asynchronous nodes, the ability to arbitrarily reconfigure their connections, and probably some much more sophisticated training logic, and I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing things emerge that at least vaguely resemble a mind. At least after scaling up a thousandfold beyond existing networks, into the realm of the hundreds of trillions of synapses in the human brain.
Shaping that potential into something coherent, that demonstrates motives and goals, may prove to be an even greater challenge - an awful lot of organic wiring structure seems to be governed by millions of years of emergent growth patterns. We may be able to "cheat" and use detailed brain scans to "jump start" an AI by duplicating a human brain network. Maybe. But frankly even if it were successful that seems like it has a lot of potential to go horribly wrong - all the irrationality of a human brain, with none of the biological drives or constraints it developed in response to.
Operations per second will only give you information processing speed though, not complexity of "thought". If you sped up a mouse's brain a thousandfold you wouldn't get a human-level intelligence, you'd just get a very fast-thinking mouse.
Also, organic neurons may "fire" at around 1 kHz frequency, but unlike a clocked NN node, they're asynchronous and use the timing of of incoming pulses to decide when and whether they should fire, as they posses both internal memory and information processing ability - unlike the "dumb switches" in a NN
As for duplicated circuitry - given the enormous metabolic costs of a brain, there's probably very little actual duplication being done. For example, the brain probably doesn't process images from each eye independently, but instead integrates both inputs and processes them together (as a supporting example, each hemisphere doesn't get input from one eye, but instead corresponding half-views from both eyes)
> it is unclear whether it can be created.
Not at all - we have countless billions of examples of electro-chemical general-purpose "strong" intelligences wandering the planet proving that it can be done. The only question is if they can be recreated using current hardware and techniques. Personally I suspect one of the biggest shortcoming of current "deep learning" strategies is the layered design - organic brains are a jumbled mess of interconnected neurons with an enormous amount of feedback. Without feedback you can't even create standing waves, which provide one of the few clues we have into how organic brains function.
Probably even more significant than the "neuron" shortcomings, are the architectural ones.
AI neural networks are generally arranged in layers - feed one layer the raw input, then use its output as the input to layer 2, whose output is used as the input to layer 3, and so on and so forth through as many layers as you want/need to get the outputs you desire.
Contrast that to an organic brain, where everything is a jumbled interconnected mess with lots of feedback. Considering the incredible power of feedback in even simple electronic and mechanical systems, expecting a layered neural network to behave even remotely similarly to an organic brain is ludicrous.
Of course the catch is that the singularity has nothing to do with human immortality.
Biological immortality is likely to be both an extremely difficult challenge, and rather uninteresting to synthetic minds.
And even if AI hardware is capable of hosting an "uploaded" human mind intact - that doesn't do anything for *you*. Having an immortal mind-twin is unlikely to make you feel any better about your own impending demise - and that's assuming they wouldn't have to kill you in order to map your brain in the first place.
A strong claim. How exactly do you measure the distance between existing AI and strong AI, before strong AI is developed?
Personally, I suspect that once strong AI is developed, there's a fair chance we'll see modern "neural" networks as a step in the right direction. After all we know the basic strategy is sound - a much more sophisticated version of it is driving our own minds.
For comparison though - In 2015 Digital Reasoning built the largest neural network in the world, at 160 billion parameters. I'm guessing a "parameter" is a weighted connection between "neurons", and thus roughly analogous to a single synapse in an organic brain, of which a human brain has 100-1000 trillion. So, even barring any "secret sauce" we haven't yet figured out in how "processing nodes" interconnect, our most advanced AIs have less than 0.1% of the processing potential of a human brain. Even a mouse brain apparently averages almost a billion synapses per mm^3, so in the neighborhood of 400 billion synapses for a common house mouse.
So, currently our most advanced AIs have only a fraction of the processing potential of a mouse brain, and that's before you even consider the fact that continuous asynchronous signalling is likely far more information-dense than a clocked AI "neural network", or the fact that individual biological neurons actually do a fair amount of internal processing and data retention, rather than being "dumb switches" as they are in modern AIs.
Really hard to tell how the software and strategies compares, when your hardware is underpowered by several orders of magnitude.
Not necessarily - we may eventually develop such an accurate model of the universe that there are no longer any measurable inconsistencies to drive further research.
At that point all that's left is engineering and "stamp collecting" - exploring and cataloging new locations, organisms, etc. And barring FTL even that will eventually become impossible as the expansion of the universe carries the last of the unexplored stars beyond the limits of the observable universe.
You have a deeply flawed understanding of both rationality and human nature. Hint, there's no such thing as a rational human - only humans that are capable of thinking (mostly) rationally when they need to. Nobody goes into science for rational reasons - the hours are long, the pay sucks, and the odds of monetizing a discovery make the lottery look like a good investment.
All astronomically accurate horoscopes are themselves completely accurate, but usually begin and end with "something will happen today"
Very occasionally they may be further clarified with some details like "A large meteor impact will ignite global firestorms and likely trigger a 'nuclear winter'", or "Much of the planet's surface will be incinerated by a nearby supernova", but those are rare enough that there weren't any (human) astronomolgers around to make the prediction last time.
That seemed so improbable that I figured you must have slipped a decimal pace somewhere and double-checked your work. Looks good though.
Here's the math for anyone interested
Schwarzschild radius r = 2MG/c^2
Volume of a sphere = 4/3*pi*r^3
density = M / [4/3*pi*(2MG/c^2)^3] = M * 3/4pi * (c^2 / 2MG)^3 = 3/32pi * c^6/(G^3 M^2)
Galaxy Mass ~~= 10^12 * M_sol (@ 2*10^30kg) = 2*10^42kg
black hole density = 3/32/pi*(300,000,000 m/s )^6 / (6.674×1011 m3kg1s2)^3 / (2*10^42kg)^2
~= 0.0008 kg/m^3
Why? Last I heard diesel looks and smells worse (at least in the typical American engine), but gasoline exhaust was a significantly larger health hazard.
Machine learning isn't programming - code just provides the infrastructure. The biological analog would be claiming that because we know how individual neurons work (*) we understand everything there is to know about human intelligence. The reality is the overwhelming majority of the functionality is encoded in the network interconnections - and the AI created those on its own.
(*) we don't actually, we've barely scratched the surface.
Can you offer any reference for that claim? The *media* reported it as a failure, I don't recall ever hearing anything from the scientists in that regard, except with a bunch of qualifiers that make it clear that it only failed to reach the ideal goal - which is why they were doing the experiment in the first place.
Sure there will be - a much larger population to interact with, and a mcuh larger environment to work in. Small-group dynamics can get particularly ugly over long periods, especially with a bunch of self-important egos involved (they are scientists after all, possibly even worse than actors for large egos).
You also have the fact that your colonists will be people self-selected (and hopefully further screened) to be willing to travel to another planet on what may very well turn out to be a one-way trip, to spend the rest of their life building an offworld colony - rather than scientists willing to sacrifice face-to-face interactions with their loved ones for a couple years for the sake of their research.
The Loop plan is designed with a much larger applicability than just "to the airport" - for the airport scenario I would assume they just (mostly) just carry passenger modules instead of cars. (I assume some of the airport staff might want to bring their cars with them though)
That's the radiation exposure at the surface of the ship. Hence the "middle of a densely packed cargo ship" - the cargo doubles as radiation shielding. It only takes a few meters worth of rock-equivalent mass (14 pounds of shielding per square inch of surface) to duplicate the shielding effects of Earth's atmosphere. You don't get the benefit of the magnetosphere - but I believe that doesn't so much stop a lot of things that would otherwise reach all the way to the surface, as stop those particles from stripping away the atmosphere they would otherwise collide with.
As for nitrogen, the atmosphere is certainly a potential, if energy-intensive, source. The problem being that you really only need a comparative trickle of CO2 to offset atmosphere leakage and support ecosystem growth. Meanwhile for every kg of atmospheric CO2 you collect, you only get 20g of Nitrogen (along with 21g of Argon, 1.5g or O2, and 0.5g of CO). But perhaps you could work out some more efficient way to separate the N2 out of ambient atmosphere.
As for mechanically producing and filtering your atmosphere - there's no need and it introduces massive potential for failure, as you point out. That's a solution for when you're mass-constrained. In a colony you'd do it the same way we do it here - with plants. You're basically building one of those sealed terrarium-in-a-jar toys, just on a massive scale - rather like they did with Biosphere 2, only with no artificial requirements to be closed loop, so you can import all the water, CO2, and other useful materials you can find outside, and with complete control over the light exposure your greenhouses are getting, so that you can fine-tune photosynthesis rates as needed.
Pollution will certainly be an issue - but lots of plants are very good at filtering the air. the most important aspect will be minimizing the amount of artificial pollutants introduced - which shouldn't be too difficult, as they all have to be imported. (Industry would, I assume, operate in Martian atmosphere, possibly compressed if helpful.)
Yes it was - Biosphere 1 is also known as "Earth". They were attempting to recreate the critical parts on a much smaller scale.
Mission 1 lasted for the full 2-year plan. They had a LOT of problems, but they persevered and completed their mission. And those problems were the whole *point* of the experiment - to find out what problems they didn't already know about. If it had gone off without a hitch then the whole experiment would have been completely useless except as "proof" that we already knew everything.
Certainly you'd prefer to have at least basic habitats in place before you land, maybe even greenhouses up and running, but after that all you really need is agriculture to survive in the short term. And it's expected that it will take years, maybe several decades, before a colony could have a good chance of survival if the shipments from Earth stopped. That's risk is inherent in the endeavor - if you're not willing to accept it, don't go. Those who don't want to put their life on the line to colonize a new world will, by necessity, have to wait until other people have built it for them, and then accept whatever vision they can buy into for it. That's how it's always been.
You know what else causes a small but permanent reduction in health? Living on Earth for a year. There's certainly room for improvement, but a solution does exist.
You seem to be assuming that being able to live on Mars means living just as long and healthily as if you had staid on Earth. Why should that be the case? Colonists have *always* seen reduced lifespans compared to those who stayed home, and especially for the early waves of colonists into such an isolated and unforgiving environment, it probably won't be gravity-related health complications that kill them.
Even if Mars gravity cuts life expectancy by maybe 20%, why is that a problem? So long as the people making the choice to move there think it's worth the risk - so be it. You could increase your lifespan considerably on Earth living in a hermetically sealed bubble and consuming only maximally nutritious/minimally unhealthy foods - but nobody considers it a problem when you decide to do enjoy life instead. And don't bother mentioning the children who didn't make the choice - you enter the world, you takes your chances. Few people are up in arms over the hundreds of millions of children born into environments right here on Earth that subject them to much worse life expectancy reductions.
So it does, I stand corrected. Though with only one engine each it probably doesn't have the potential torsion issues of a cluster of mutli-core rockets. I suspect the issue will be not so much keeping the thrust through the center of mass, the Falcons seem to have worked out pretty accurate engine throttling, as in keeping the linkage stresses within acceptable limits while avoiding (or dealing with) barrel rolls and other aerodynamic complexities of a non-cylindrical rocket.
You're quite possibly right about the N1. I thought I remembered something about ejecting engines as well, but we all know how unreliable memory is. I do recall it being used as an example of how the Falcon multi-core strategy would never work.
So I guess it's not so much doing much fundamentally new, just combining several of existing technologies into a new and hopefully more capable arrangement. I can live with that.
Though, the fact that the Delta IV Heavy managed to make it to orbit on it's maiden flight gives me more hope that Musk is intentionally underselling their chances of success.