It's amazing how NASA has gone from a genuinely benign government agency advancing the sciences to a parasitic organization that acts a distributor of government pork. And they have a lot of good PR for what they do - hordes of nerds echoing insanely stupid sentiments like 'penny on the dollar!!!'
It was sad enough when NASA's so-called 'mission to prepare for Mars' was actually a pathetic plan involving moving a tiny asteroid to Earth/Lunar orbit and then sending some astronauts up there to take selfies. But now the mission has been downscaled even beyond that level, to where they're basically fine if they can just get a electric propulsion system to work. This would be akin to downscaling the Apollo program to a test-stand demonstration of a rocket engine firing.
End NASA's manned space program. Fire NASA management. Focus on the stuff NASA does best (robotic exploration). Fuck the congresspeople who piggyback on enthusiasm for space to send money to their own districts.
I couldn't believe this argument could get any worse, but it suddenly has. Are you proposing that out there we have a population of star eaters that are breeding stars for their own consumption?
1) If you read the article, many of the stars that would fit the profile for what they're proposing agree pretty well with the type of star that our sun is. G-class stars are incredibly common.
2) Ok... how did it come into being? Did God just magick it into existence? All forms of life need to either evolve or be created by some other form of life. If it evolved, then there by definition must be a large population of such star eaters, plus all their precursor life-forms, etc. If it was designed, then the designers must be pretty powerful beings themselves. Where are they? Where are their effects on the galaxy?
You can't just have a star eater popping up out of nowhere and leaving no trace behind. Wtf?
With current technology we have the means to push spacecraft to 60 km/s. This isn't hypothetical tech, it's stuff that's sitting in the shed. At such velocities, craft could traverse the milky way galaxy 20 times over during the (current) lifetime of the galaxy (estimated at around 13 billion years). The galaxy is big, but it's not that big, not compared to the time scales involved here.
1. It wouldn't single out our star. That's the entire point. Such life would be devouring all stars in the galaxy. 2. This isn't about a single star-eating being/lifeform/civilization. If you read the article, the premise is that there are millions of these things. Which there must be, if they are to exist at all. The only thing stupider than a galaxy full of star eaters is a galaxy with only one star eater.
Radio receivers work through several mechanisms. First, you have an antenna that is only sensitive to a certain frequency range (but highly sensitive in that range). Then you have some kind of tunable resonant circuit that narrows down the range of frequencies even further, ideally to just the single frequency band you're looking for. When radio reception is good, the signal/noise ratio in that band is quite large, even if the signal is weak. That is, the radio signal is overwhelmingly the most powerful thing in that band, far more powerful than the noise in that band. So it's not really a measurement of '8 digits of accuracy'. It's more like 3 or 4 digits of accuracy.
My first response to this article was, "Oh ffs, give it a rest." I read the article and that's still my response.
There's conclusive evidence that star-eating life in our galaxy does not exist: Our sun is still shining bright. Unless you're seriously stupid enough to think that somehow star-eating life would leave us alone for some reason. Or even more stupid and think that over billions of years it wouldn't have reached us.
All our money? If the goal of a Mars colony is just 'saving the species', then even a single dollar of public funds is too much. Really. You would object to other wastes of public funds, no matter how small. Why make an exception just because the word 'Mars' is involved?
If the goal is, on the other hand, something more important, like an experiment to learn how to build better human societies and how to deal with the inevitable rise of AIs, then that's a different question. But there's no reason to think that Mars is the best place to carry out such experiments. It's probably the worst place, actually (well, at least in the inner solar system).
Yup, it seems hilarious to me that people say we need to go to Mars to ensure the survival of the human race, except Earth has ensured the survival of humans for 100,000 years and all it would take for a Mars colony to completely die would be a simple power outage incident. Even if 10,000 people were living on Mars, it would still be a tenuous place to live until it was completely terraformed.
But I disagree with your premise that _anything_ threatens our existence here at all. No asteroid impact or nuclear war would wipe out the human race. Destroy civilization? Maybe. But not the human race. Even if 1000 people survived it would be enough to propagate the species.
Is it a good idea to voluntarily phase out human beings? No.
But I think itzly's position is that humanity is not the end-goal of evolution; we are just one step in the evolutionary process, and for the time being we should be more focused on ensuring a better standard of living and environment for ourselves and our immediate descendants. Thinking about what's going to happen a million years down the road is incredibly premature at this point. If humans are no longer around in a million years (and they probably won't be), that has no effect on the here and now.
Do you understand why rockets use staging? Do you realize that the first stage (by far the heaviest and most expensive part of the rocket) does not go to space?
I'm pretty sure if you gave SpaceX $150 billion they could also send a bunch of astronauts to the moon. Hell, even the ULA could do that, and they are wasteful behemoths.
SpaceX carried out its entire Falcon 9 development and launch program (including ISS resupply mission) with less money than a single shuttle launch.
Don't get me wrong, Apollo was great, and the Apollo program was done _extremely_ well given the time constraints ("...by the end of this decade") and technological abilities of the time. It was nothing short of a technological miracle carried out by the very best minds the world had to offer. But it cost 1/8 trillion dollars (in today's money). Never forget that when making a comparison.
Yup I agree. It's true that a lot of billionaire philanthropists are full of it, but not all of them are.
Musk has made a well-defined and significant contribution: Development of a cheap reusable rocket. This isn't some wishy-washy concept like "paradigm shift in how we interact with our technology" or "revolutionary new power source that could change the world if only people listened!" This is something that can be measured in pounds-force, tons to LEO, and gallons of LOX.
Why do we even need offices anyway? We got a bunch of people gathering together in one building only to try the best they can to work privately on their computers and not interact with each other. In the past this might have made some sense, as the office had specialized equipment that was only available there, and you often had to pass documents quickly to/from your colleagues.
It seems we need a new paradigm where people actually use the office to interact with each other in a productive way. Until then the only reason for going to an office is for the stress of your boss' presence to force you to work.
To add to that, physics has been telling us about the speed of light limit for over 150 years now. Maxwell's equations (published in 1861), contained them implicitly, and for a few years nobody really noticed (or tried to offer alternative explanations like the aether). In 1905 (110 years ago), Einstein finally formalized the concept. In those 150 years no experiment or even speculative theory has hinted to us that FTL is even remotely possible. Everything tells us its flat-out impossible. Stuff like wormholes _may_ be possible but they introduce a whole bunch of new unsolved problems. And none of the proposed ideas like wormholes or warp drives are based on any kind of experiment; they are just based on extrapolating theories beyond their domain of applicability. They probably represent our ignorance more than anything.
But try convincing the 'believers' that aliens don't have FTL.
The SR-71 - which moved about 3x as fast as almost all military aircraft at the time - was first tested around the early 1960's. Then there was suddenly a surge of sightings of triangle-shaped ufos blazing around at mach 3 speeds, which _obviously_ couldn't have been from a military jet because no military jet went that fast.
> Each cell divided from your original ovum/sperm combination. Those came from their parents, which came from their parents, etc. etc.
That has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
> But that is also not insurmountable. It's called gradual replacement. Kill about 1% of the brain every year and grow new cells.
Claims like this come from people who don't know neuroscience. The brain is a dense intertwined tangled mess of neurons, glia, and axons. Imagine being in a datacenter room from hell: billions of nodes, _trillions_ of cables arranged virtually randomly, forming links and tangles of dizzying complexity, some cables stretching from one end of the building to another, and the whole thing being so densely packed that you couldn't even begin to walk through it. Now someone asks you to replace a server rack deep inside the mess.
If you want to replace part of the brain, you have to replace all the connections from that part of the brain to the other parts of the brain. Otherwise you haven't replaced anything; you've just given someone a lobotomy and then placed a tumor of neural cells in its place. Not saying it's impossible, you'd just need a really high level of technology - the ability to go in and carefully remove axons one by one, then replace them with fresh axons - to do it. To be honest, I think some level of mind uploading would actually be a lot simpler.
> But you are wrong when you think the constraints are freer for artificial intelligence. They simply are not there.
The constraints are freer because you can engineer it any way you want. Machines might not be self-repairing, but so what? Nothing is truly self-repairing (except maybe objects in ground thermodynamic states like crystals and so on, but an intelligence will never be in such a state). If a machine breaks down, copy all its contents to a new machine.
Your 'hacking' argument is bogus. For one thing, biological brains can be hacked just fine. Both on a conceptual level (you could argue that cults and so on hijack normal thinking processes), a chemical level (what do you think heroin and cocaine do?) and a neural circuitry level (viruses, parasites, etc.). For another, there's nothing stopping you from designing an AI that is highly resistant to manipulation. Just because carelessly-designed computer systems get hacked, doesn't mean all computer systems are hopelessly vulnerable.
> It may just take them a *long* time to reach every planet.
But the galaxy has been around for an even longer time: 13.2 billion years. Assuming it took 3 billion years for intelligent life to develop on at least one planet, a probe traveling at 60 km/s (within current human technological ability) could travel across the entire galaxy 20 times.
If the probes are self-replicating (as OP said), there's no reason for each one to visit every single planet. They really could explore the galaxy at maximum speed.
It's not just cancer. There's buildup of molecular junk inside cells, lack of ability of existing cells to effectively divide into new ones to replace old cells, a huge number of genetically-determined aging programs (telomeres are just one example among many), and so on. Even if we solve the cancer problem, as you'd age you'd need more and more cellular-level maintenance to battle the march towards decay. I guess one easy way of solving the problem would be to periodically replace your organs with freshly-grown ones (assuming technology reaches the level of being able to do that), but at some point you'd need to replace the brain, and then you're in trouble.
You can never win against entropy. Even an artificial lifeform will eventually lose, but at least the constraints are freer so it can be designed to be more resistant to decay.
It's basically the 'elder race' idea (that is, lifeforms that are creations of a long-gone ancient biological 'elder' race), so yes, it's pervasive through SF and has been for decades. And for those saying that SF != Reality, it's not like the philosophers mentioned here are going by any new experimental insights. Their reasoning is exactly the same as the SF writers.
The distinction between deep belief networks (based on graphical models) and deep neural networks (based on perceptions and backprop) is an imprecise one. You could argue that DNNs are just a subtype of DBNs, and yes, the only 'successful' DBNs so far have been DNNs. When people speak of DBNs they almost always mean DNNs.
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> The farther away the object you want to study, the more limited the kind of science you can make with a robot.
And that's even more true for manned exploration...
It's amazing how NASA has gone from a genuinely benign government agency advancing the sciences to a parasitic organization that acts a distributor of government pork. And they have a lot of good PR for what they do - hordes of nerds echoing insanely stupid sentiments like 'penny on the dollar!!!'
It was sad enough when NASA's so-called 'mission to prepare for Mars' was actually a pathetic plan involving moving a tiny asteroid to Earth/Lunar orbit and then sending some astronauts up there to take selfies. But now the mission has been downscaled even beyond that level, to where they're basically fine if they can just get a electric propulsion system to work. This would be akin to downscaling the Apollo program to a test-stand demonstration of a rocket engine firing.
End NASA's manned space program. Fire NASA management. Focus on the stuff NASA does best (robotic exploration). Fuck the congresspeople who piggyback on enthusiasm for space to send money to their own districts.
Our galaxy has enough stars (10^11) to be a pretty good representation.
I couldn't believe this argument could get any worse, but it suddenly has. Are you proposing that out there we have a population of star eaters that are breeding stars for their own consumption?
What comes out of the back end of such a being would probably be rich in Iron and Nickel, so yes, definitely.
This argument keeps getting worse.
1) If you read the article, many of the stars that would fit the profile for what they're proposing agree pretty well with the type of star that our sun is. G-class stars are incredibly common.
2) Ok... how did it come into being? Did God just magick it into existence? All forms of life need to either evolve or be created by some other form of life. If it evolved, then there by definition must be a large population of such star eaters, plus all their precursor life-forms, etc. If it was designed, then the designers must be pretty powerful beings themselves. Where are they? Where are their effects on the galaxy?
You can't just have a star eater popping up out of nowhere and leaving no trace behind. Wtf?
Nope, I haven't.
With current technology we have the means to push spacecraft to 60 km/s. This isn't hypothetical tech, it's stuff that's sitting in the shed. At such velocities, craft could traverse the milky way galaxy 20 times over during the (current) lifetime of the galaxy (estimated at around 13 billion years). The galaxy is big, but it's not that big, not compared to the time scales involved here.
Wrong, and wrong.
1. It wouldn't single out our star. That's the entire point. Such life would be devouring all stars in the galaxy.
2. This isn't about a single star-eating being/lifeform/civilization. If you read the article, the premise is that there are millions of these things. Which there must be, if they are to exist at all. The only thing stupider than a galaxy full of star eaters is a galaxy with only one star eater.
Radio receivers work through several mechanisms. First, you have an antenna that is only sensitive to a certain frequency range (but highly sensitive in that range). Then you have some kind of tunable resonant circuit that narrows down the range of frequencies even further, ideally to just the single frequency band you're looking for. When radio reception is good, the signal/noise ratio in that band is quite large, even if the signal is weak. That is, the radio signal is overwhelmingly the most powerful thing in that band, far more powerful than the noise in that band. So it's not really a measurement of '8 digits of accuracy'. It's more like 3 or 4 digits of accuracy.
My first response to this article was, "Oh ffs, give it a rest." I read the article and that's still my response.
There's conclusive evidence that star-eating life in our galaxy does not exist: Our sun is still shining bright. Unless you're seriously stupid enough to think that somehow star-eating life would leave us alone for some reason. Or even more stupid and think that over billions of years it wouldn't have reached us.
All our money? If the goal of a Mars colony is just 'saving the species', then even a single dollar of public funds is too much. Really. You would object to other wastes of public funds, no matter how small. Why make an exception just because the word 'Mars' is involved?
If the goal is, on the other hand, something more important, like an experiment to learn how to build better human societies and how to deal with the inevitable rise of AIs, then that's a different question. But there's no reason to think that Mars is the best place to carry out such experiments. It's probably the worst place, actually (well, at least in the inner solar system).
Yup, it seems hilarious to me that people say we need to go to Mars to ensure the survival of the human race, except Earth has ensured the survival of humans for 100,000 years and all it would take for a Mars colony to completely die would be a simple power outage incident. Even if 10,000 people were living on Mars, it would still be a tenuous place to live until it was completely terraformed.
But I disagree with your premise that _anything_ threatens our existence here at all. No asteroid impact or nuclear war would wipe out the human race. Destroy civilization? Maybe. But not the human race. Even if 1000 people survived it would be enough to propagate the species.
Is it a good idea to voluntarily phase out human beings? No.
But I think itzly's position is that humanity is not the end-goal of evolution; we are just one step in the evolutionary process, and for the time being we should be more focused on ensuring a better standard of living and environment for ourselves and our immediate descendants. Thinking about what's going to happen a million years down the road is incredibly premature at this point. If humans are no longer around in a million years (and they probably won't be), that has no effect on the here and now.
Do you understand why rockets use staging? Do you realize that the first stage (by far the heaviest and most expensive part of the rocket) does not go to space?
I'm pretty sure if you gave SpaceX $150 billion they could also send a bunch of astronauts to the moon. Hell, even the ULA could do that, and they are wasteful behemoths.
SpaceX carried out its entire Falcon 9 development and launch program (including ISS resupply mission) with less money than a single shuttle launch.
Don't get me wrong, Apollo was great, and the Apollo program was done _extremely_ well given the time constraints ("...by the end of this decade") and technological abilities of the time. It was nothing short of a technological miracle carried out by the very best minds the world had to offer. But it cost 1/8 trillion dollars (in today's money). Never forget that when making a comparison.
If the reusable rocket thing pans out, it's likely that that number will drop even further in the future.
Yup I agree. It's true that a lot of billionaire philanthropists are full of it, but not all of them are.
Musk has made a well-defined and significant contribution: Development of a cheap reusable rocket. This isn't some wishy-washy concept like "paradigm shift in how we interact with our technology" or "revolutionary new power source that could change the world if only people listened!" This is something that can be measured in pounds-force, tons to LEO, and gallons of LOX.
Why do we even need offices anyway? We got a bunch of people gathering together in one building only to try the best they can to work privately on their computers and not interact with each other. In the past this might have made some sense, as the office had specialized equipment that was only available there, and you often had to pass documents quickly to/from your colleagues.
It seems we need a new paradigm where people actually use the office to interact with each other in a productive way. Until then the only reason for going to an office is for the stress of your boss' presence to force you to work.
To add to that, physics has been telling us about the speed of light limit for over 150 years now. Maxwell's equations (published in 1861), contained them implicitly, and for a few years nobody really noticed (or tried to offer alternative explanations like the aether). In 1905 (110 years ago), Einstein finally formalized the concept. In those 150 years no experiment or even speculative theory has hinted to us that FTL is even remotely possible. Everything tells us its flat-out impossible. Stuff like wormholes _may_ be possible but they introduce a whole bunch of new unsolved problems. And none of the proposed ideas like wormholes or warp drives are based on any kind of experiment; they are just based on extrapolating theories beyond their domain of applicability. They probably represent our ignorance more than anything.
But try convincing the 'believers' that aliens don't have FTL.
The SR-71 - which moved about 3x as fast as almost all military aircraft at the time - was first tested around the early 1960's. Then there was suddenly a surge of sightings of triangle-shaped ufos blazing around at mach 3 speeds, which _obviously_ couldn't have been from a military jet because no military jet went that fast.
> Each cell divided from your original ovum/sperm combination. Those came from their parents, which came from their parents, etc. etc.
That has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
> But that is also not insurmountable. It's called gradual replacement. Kill about 1% of the brain every year and grow new cells.
Claims like this come from people who don't know neuroscience. The brain is a dense intertwined tangled mess of neurons, glia, and axons. Imagine being in a datacenter room from hell: billions of nodes, _trillions_ of cables arranged virtually randomly, forming links and tangles of dizzying complexity, some cables stretching from one end of the building to another, and the whole thing being so densely packed that you couldn't even begin to walk through it. Now someone asks you to replace a server rack deep inside the mess.
If you want to replace part of the brain, you have to replace all the connections from that part of the brain to the other parts of the brain. Otherwise you haven't replaced anything; you've just given someone a lobotomy and then placed a tumor of neural cells in its place. Not saying it's impossible, you'd just need a really high level of technology - the ability to go in and carefully remove axons one by one, then replace them with fresh axons - to do it. To be honest, I think some level of mind uploading would actually be a lot simpler.
> But you are wrong when you think the constraints are freer for artificial intelligence. They simply are not there.
The constraints are freer because you can engineer it any way you want. Machines might not be self-repairing, but so what? Nothing is truly self-repairing (except maybe objects in ground thermodynamic states like crystals and so on, but an intelligence will never be in such a state). If a machine breaks down, copy all its contents to a new machine.
Your 'hacking' argument is bogus. For one thing, biological brains can be hacked just fine. Both on a conceptual level (you could argue that cults and so on hijack normal thinking processes), a chemical level (what do you think heroin and cocaine do?) and a neural circuitry level (viruses, parasites, etc.). For another, there's nothing stopping you from designing an AI that is highly resistant to manipulation. Just because carelessly-designed computer systems get hacked, doesn't mean all computer systems are hopelessly vulnerable.
> It may just take them a *long* time to reach every planet.
But the galaxy has been around for an even longer time: 13.2 billion years. Assuming it took 3 billion years for intelligent life to develop on at least one planet, a probe traveling at 60 km/s (within current human technological ability) could travel across the entire galaxy 20 times.
If the probes are self-replicating (as OP said), there's no reason for each one to visit every single planet. They really could explore the galaxy at maximum speed.
It's not just cancer. There's buildup of molecular junk inside cells, lack of ability of existing cells to effectively divide into new ones to replace old cells, a huge number of genetically-determined aging programs (telomeres are just one example among many), and so on. Even if we solve the cancer problem, as you'd age you'd need more and more cellular-level maintenance to battle the march towards decay. I guess one easy way of solving the problem would be to periodically replace your organs with freshly-grown ones (assuming technology reaches the level of being able to do that), but at some point you'd need to replace the brain, and then you're in trouble.
You can never win against entropy. Even an artificial lifeform will eventually lose, but at least the constraints are freer so it can be designed to be more resistant to decay.
It's basically the 'elder race' idea (that is, lifeforms that are creations of a long-gone ancient biological 'elder' race), so yes, it's pervasive through SF and has been for decades. And for those saying that SF != Reality, it's not like the philosophers mentioned here are going by any new experimental insights. Their reasoning is exactly the same as the SF writers.
The distinction between deep belief networks (based on graphical models) and deep neural networks (based on perceptions and backprop) is an imprecise one. You could argue that DNNs are just a subtype of DBNs, and yes, the only 'successful' DBNs so far have been DNNs. When people speak of DBNs they almost always mean DNNs.