Feynman said no one understands - present tense - quantum mechanics. He never stopped trying to change that, to make it comprehensible. He figured it just wasn't understood - yet.
This is why getting people to commit to the effort to build an interstellar probe is pretty much a non-starter. We're perfectly happy to wait for the "breakthrough breakthrough" thankyouverymuch.
Because everyone thinks like you. That's why nobody's ever moved off to a frontier, they'd rather wait for the airport to get built and fly there.
So a concept that got killed in the early 60s is more real than a current project that is actually in testing? Can we get a "get off my lawn" while you are at it?
The parent just said, essentially, "I don't think time travel is possible, and all right-thinking people should agree with me, though I won't offer a concrete reason for my position."
When I point out that just a blanket "I don't think something is possible" isn't an argument, it gets modded offtopic? Really?
If the past can't be changed, you can have causal loops (self-causing events) but those aren't inconsistent like paradoxes. And that's ignoring the many-worlds resolution.
Exactly. If you can send information into the past - which effectively means sending mass/energy - that's all you need. You don't have to send individual bits. You could send emails. You could send sound files. Heck, you could hook up some cameras and watch the future in... er... 'real time'.
The only question is the bandwidth, and how many people have access to the channel. See here.
Well, either way, the key is not to get angry yourself.
For the types that have, er, "poor interpersonal communication skills", it can keep the conversation from getting derailed. For the types that are looking to get people angry, it's like judo - it frustrates them.
I wouldn't say it's "grandstanding by the Papacy". There was a lot of misinformation going around about the app - a lot of news stories that were flat wrong - and setting the record straight officially and unambiguously makes sense. (I'm hardly a fan of the Catholic Church, but they're not guilty of quite everything they're accused of.:) )
It might have been deliberate, but NPR segued straight from talking about the (sadly almost certainly temporary) failure to renew the Patriot Act provisions... to discussing protests in Egypt over the decades-old 'emergency provisions' that gave 'sweeping powers to the security services'.
If you know the math, you should be able to come up with regression tests and find corner cases and invalid approximations and so forth. In other words, you should be able to find bugs, or prove that certain bugs aren't present. This is a very valuable service, and you can get familiar with the code by writing the tests that use it and understanding the ways it implements the algorithms involved.
Humans suck at extrapolating outside of their experience. Essentially everything we've discovered about the universe since we left the African savanna has been a big surprise. F=ma? Big surprise (constrast with Aristotle's laws of motion). Heliocentrism? Evolution? Relativity? QM? All big surprises.
I am extremely dubious about our ability to even speculate about something so far removed from human experience as the birth of universes. That applies to physicists and theologians, though it seems to me that physicists at least try to test their hypotheses as best they can.
I'm pretty sure that, whatever the answer turns out to be, it won't look much like anything that anybody today expects. I won't call myself 'agnostic' because I believe it's at least in principle possible to reach some conclusions, eventually. I guess you'd call me "non-gnostic, for now".
But then, they used the whole "sensors don't work" excuse to prevent anything like that. Though they didn't have trouble with that at hometree which would have had a similar or greater level of unobtanium.
Allegedly, some areas laced with unobtainium had huge magnetic fields, and some didn't. I distinctly recall an aerial photo of the Tree Of Souls, though, that the humans were looking over at some point. Sensors or no, that meant they knew to a high degree of precision where it was. A rock dropped from orbit would take it out with minimal-to-no fallout. It'd have to be non-metallic so the magnetic fields wouldn't put it off-course, but that's no big deal. You can tailor the yield pretty precisely, too, that way.
As you note, even if you ignore the orbital bombardment scenario, a higher airdrop would make more sense. There were some rock prominences over the tree, but that would just make a couple passes necessary, that's all.
But unrelated to the question of destroying a single person on a planet.
They weren't trying to destroy "a single person on a planet". They were trying to destroy the "Tree of Souls", a tree rooted to the ground. In a specific, known place on that planet.
It's not necessarily easy to convert a space-ship engine into a weapon. It is entirely possible that we could produce large versions to power space-ships, but miniaturization of the technology is impractical.
A handheld version, quite possibly not. There's even precedent... there's a lower limit on how massive a nuclear bomb can be, for example. However, a ship-mounted or orbital weapon? No problem. According to wikipedia, the spaceship's powered by antimatter - talk about a substance ripe for weaponization!
And - to reiterate - any spacefaring race has the ability to drop rocks. The humans knew where the tree was. They had aerial reconnaisance.
Your basic premise "well if we have fast spaceships we must have amazing laser guns too" isn't really a valid argument.
As I recall on some of the websites, there was some discussion of the science. Using the unobtainium, they'd built relativistic spaceships.
Larry Niven, in his "Known Space" stories, made a good point about this. One of the alien races, the Kzinti, attempt to conquer the (at the time peaceable and weaponless) humans, and fail. They still speak of the "Human Lesson" - 'A reaction drive is a weapon in direct proportion to its efficiency as a reaction drive.'
If you can drive a sizeable spaceship at anything vaguely approaching the speed of light for several years, then your reaction drives can harness a truly ridiculous amount of energy. Applying this as a weapon is a very small matter of engineering.
And if nothing else, if you can put a (several) big spaceship(s) in orbit around a moon of a gas giant in another star system, then you can drop a non-metallic rock on a precise spot on that moon.
On a more serious note, help me out. I've always wondered what motivates a troll. I mean, come on, what do you get out of it? Do you really think you don't have anything positive to add to a conversation? Is it that you don't think you can defend a position, so you'll just do ad hominem?
Look, even if you succeed in derailing a conversation, inhibiting communication, and irritating people... like, wow. Stupid people do that without trying, all the time. Screwing things up is easy. It's trivial. It's like trying to be the world's best stumbler, or putting a lot of effort into doing a really awesome faceplant. What's the point?
The reality is that the embryo is biologically a distinct human being.
Actually, that 'reality' is in dispute.
Not the 'biologically distinct' aspect. The 'human being' aspect. An fertilized egg or a blastula is certainly 'human life', but by that definition so is a liver cell. The question is, is it a human being?
I've thought about this, and reached the conclusion that if it doesn't have a human brain, then it's not a human being. Whether or not a brain is a sufficient condition for 'humanity', it seems to be a necessary one. So, a fertilized egg or a blastula, while certainly 'human life', is not (yet) a 'human being', so far as I can tell.
While true, this is also completely meaningless. For even trivial pattern spaces of, say, 512 bits, "long enough" would be far longer than the current age of the Universe.
In the late 1980s, ecologist Thomas Ray, who is now at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, got wind of Core Wars and saw its potential for studying evolution. He built Tierra, a computerised world populated by self-replicating programs that could make errors as they reproduced.
I was so amazed by the results claimed for Tierra that I went and reimplemented it myself. And damned if I didn't get similar results. At the time, it blew me away that such a system could come up with novel solutions I hadn't expected or 'programmed in'. Indeed, a couple times it took me a while to even figure out how the things worked.
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Feynman said no one understands - present tense - quantum mechanics. He never stopped trying to change that, to make it comprehensible. He figured it just wasn't understood - yet.
Because everyone thinks like you. That's why nobody's ever moved off to a frontier, they'd rather wait for the airport to get built and fly there.
Hey, wait a second...
Okay. Get off my lawn.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
The parent just said, essentially, "I don't think time travel is possible, and all right-thinking people should agree with me, though I won't offer a concrete reason for my position." When I point out that just a blanket "I don't think something is possible" isn't an argument, it gets modded offtopic? Really?
If the past can't be changed, you can have causal loops (self-causing events) but those aren't inconsistent like paradoxes. And that's ignoring the many-worlds resolution.
I know. Those people who proposed we'd be able to harness the force of lightning, or build an atomic bomb, were annoying too.
The only question is the bandwidth, and how many people have access to the channel. See here.
How many neutrinos went through our planet before we built detectors capable of noticing an insignificant fraction of them?
Well, either way, the key is not to get angry yourself. For the types that have, er, "poor interpersonal communication skills", it can keep the conversation from getting derailed. For the types that are looking to get people angry, it's like judo - it frustrates them.
I wouldn't say it's "grandstanding by the Papacy". There was a lot of misinformation going around about the app - a lot of news stories that were flat wrong - and setting the record straight officially and unambiguously makes sense. (I'm hardly a fan of the Catholic Church, but they're not guilty of quite everything they're accused of. :) )
It might have been deliberate, but NPR segued straight from talking about the (sadly almost certainly temporary) failure to renew the Patriot Act provisions... to discussing protests in Egypt over the decades-old 'emergency provisions' that gave 'sweeping powers to the security services'.
Of course, I've thought about time travel more than is healthy.
If you know the math, you should be able to come up with regression tests and find corner cases and invalid approximations and so forth. In other words, you should be able to find bugs, or prove that certain bugs aren't present. This is a very valuable service, and you can get familiar with the code by writing the tests that use it and understanding the ways it implements the algorithms involved.
There are definite problems with the logic used in "Mere Christianity". Which is why you're modded "funny" right now, I guess.
I am extremely dubious about our ability to even speculate about something so far removed from human experience as the birth of universes. That applies to physicists and theologians, though it seems to me that physicists at least try to test their hypotheses as best they can.
I'm pretty sure that, whatever the answer turns out to be, it won't look much like anything that anybody today expects. I won't call myself 'agnostic' because I believe it's at least in principle possible to reach some conclusions, eventually. I guess you'd call me "non-gnostic, for now".
Allegedly, some areas laced with unobtainium had huge magnetic fields, and some didn't. I distinctly recall an aerial photo of the Tree Of Souls, though, that the humans were looking over at some point. Sensors or no, that meant they knew to a high degree of precision where it was. A rock dropped from orbit would take it out with minimal-to-no fallout. It'd have to be non-metallic so the magnetic fields wouldn't put it off-course, but that's no big deal. You can tailor the yield pretty precisely, too, that way.
As you note, even if you ignore the orbital bombardment scenario, a higher airdrop would make more sense. There were some rock prominences over the tree, but that would just make a couple passes necessary, that's all.
Wrong. That is precisely the target of the big massed assault the humans engage in at the end.
You are probably confusing it with the "Home Tree" of one Na'vi tribe that was destroyed by conventional weaponry.
They weren't trying to destroy "a single person on a planet". They were trying to destroy the "Tree of Souls", a tree rooted to the ground. In a specific, known place on that planet.
A handheld version, quite possibly not. There's even precedent... there's a lower limit on how massive a nuclear bomb can be, for example. However, a ship-mounted or orbital weapon? No problem. According to wikipedia, the spaceship's powered by antimatter - talk about a substance ripe for weaponization!
And - to reiterate - any spacefaring race has the ability to drop rocks. The humans knew where the tree was. They had aerial reconnaisance.
As I recall on some of the websites, there was some discussion of the science. Using the unobtainium, they'd built relativistic spaceships.
Larry Niven, in his "Known Space" stories, made a good point about this. One of the alien races, the Kzinti, attempt to conquer the (at the time peaceable and weaponless) humans, and fail. They still speak of the "Human Lesson" - 'A reaction drive is a weapon in direct proportion to its efficiency as a reaction drive.'
If you can drive a sizeable spaceship at anything vaguely approaching the speed of light for several years, then your reaction drives can harness a truly ridiculous amount of energy. Applying this as a weapon is a very small matter of engineering.
And if nothing else, if you can put a (several) big spaceship(s) in orbit around a moon of a gas giant in another star system, then you can drop a non-metallic rock on a precise spot on that moon.
Hell, I handled that ages ago.
On a more serious note, help me out. I've always wondered what motivates a troll. I mean, come on, what do you get out of it? Do you really think you don't have anything positive to add to a conversation? Is it that you don't think you can defend a position, so you'll just do ad hominem?
Look, even if you succeed in derailing a conversation, inhibiting communication, and irritating people... like, wow. Stupid people do that without trying, all the time. Screwing things up is easy. It's trivial. It's like trying to be the world's best stumbler, or putting a lot of effort into doing a really awesome faceplant. What's the point?
Actually, that 'reality' is in dispute.
Not the 'biologically distinct' aspect. The 'human being' aspect. An fertilized egg or a blastula is certainly 'human life', but by that definition so is a liver cell. The question is, is it a human being?
I've thought about this, and reached the conclusion that if it doesn't have a human brain, then it's not a human being. Whether or not a brain is a sufficient condition for 'humanity', it seems to be a necessary one. So, a fertilized egg or a blastula, while certainly 'human life', is not (yet) a 'human being', so far as I can tell.
Exactly, see here for an illustration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program
I was so amazed by the results claimed for Tierra that I went and reimplemented it myself. And damned if I didn't get similar results. At the time, it blew me away that such a system could come up with novel solutions I hadn't expected or 'programmed in'. Indeed, a couple times it took me a while to even figure out how the things worked.