At highway speeds I honestly don't trust a human to perform an emergency situation over a car either
One night I was driving 65 on a highway and noticed some elk in the woods running towards the road. I was paying attention because I knew it was a potential problem and also knew someone who hit one. I flipped off my lights and braked hard to barely avoid a collision when they popped out of the trees onto the road. Had I been reading a book, there's no way I'd have recognized the situation fast enough to do anything.
A few other primates are close to us, but are a few million years away. What do we have to say to these primates today? Bananas are good. I hurt my foot.In a ten million years when chimpanzees are the current us, what will we have to say to them? 000010010100010101010010000101010010000101010100010100011001010 Maybe the whole universe is talking to us, but we can't relate to what it's saying
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
I took a ton of math and controls classes in university (control systems major) and all of it was 100 year old knowledge (lv, etc). Yeah, we did modern development case studies (ARE control of flexible space structures, autonomous vehicle, etc) but as example applications, but this is very minor to the theory and what you learn.
We don't need to go anywhere at this stage of the game. 40 years ago, NASA and the DOD envisioned Earth resource monitoring by crewed orbital space stations with people taking pictures, developing them on he station, analyzing the pictures and phoning home with their findings. We could have spent billions at the time developing such a system an would have gained relatively little development knowledge in return. Proposing such a system today seems totally foolish.
Making rockets isn't hard. Development costs are on order or less than a commercial jet liner, complexity is the same (the B787 cost $32 billion to develop and costs $250million each. Also there are ~30 large commercial planes made each month). The hard part is you have maybe one to a couple chances with a rocket, whereas a plane will have thousands attempts to correct any defects. That makes rockets look hard, but their not really, at least in the sense of being harder than any equivalent sized engineering project.
So what it comes down to is an economics problem Sending
people is a very bad ROI. If you want to say we need to study humans in space in case of existential crisis, doing anything with a few dozen people over a few years won't matter much compared with the thousands of people years that could take place in a matter of a dozen or so months...if we really had to. That goes down a lot to statistics and reliability (which is the really hard part of rocket science).
That was the only real 'bump' that NASA got. It was estalished for the one and only one goal of meeting Kennedy's challenge It wasn't even about science, it was about meeting the challenge
After Apollo, NASA's next big goal was finding a sellable justification for itself.
Humans would live through a dinosaur rock encounter. Yeah, there will always e bigger rocks, but big rocks also hit Mars, every other planet, space stations and other big rocks.
The SSME are about as perfect a rocket engine that will ever be made. Only a H - F engine can be more energetic, but not worth the added complexity and the RS-25s came very close to maximum theoretical performance.
No one remembers the first person in Europe, Asia, Australia or the Americas. It's likely we don't know the first person on Antarctica either. Not to mention Africa.
I suggest there are other ways besides "sitting on our thumbs" that are orders of magnitude more feasible, economic and realizable. But I'm a rocket scientist, so what do I know?
I did that for a music class that I enrolled in. Prof said guaranteed A to anyone who got 100% on the final, so I did. The class was all about memorizing the different types of scales and other music theory trivia. It was pretty interesting, but unfortunately, I don't remember any of it. I was taking complex analysis and quantum with Claude that semester and didn't have time to dick with anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, a lot of crashes are due to pilot error, but how many saves are also due to pilots that you never read about?
At highway speeds I honestly don't trust a human to perform an emergency situation over a car either
One night I was driving 65 on a highway and noticed some elk in the woods running towards the road. I was paying attention because I knew it was a potential problem and also knew someone who hit one. I flipped off my lights and braked hard to barely avoid a collision when they popped out of the trees onto the road. Had I been reading a book, there's no way I'd have recognized the situation fast enough to do anything.
A few other primates are close to us, but are a few million years away. What do we have to say to these primates today? Bananas are good. I hurt my foot.In a ten million years when chimpanzees are the current us, what will we have to say to them? 000010010100010101010010000101010010000101010100010100011001010 Maybe the whole universe is talking to us, but we can't relate to what it's saying
Maybe the other species is machines and not meat.
There is no such thing as advanced in evolution as if there is a goal. Evolution is about better fitting to the environment.
I thought species meant only (or mostly) being able to breed with itself?
See see Sentient Quotient
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
A language teacher that I had did his thesis on ancient Roman graffiti and said the same thing.
I took a ton of math and controls classes in university (control systems major) and all of it was 100 year old knowledge (lv, etc). Yeah, we did modern development case studies (ARE control of flexible space structures, autonomous vehicle, etc) but as example applications, but this is very minor to the theory and what you learn.
Because all researchers are alike.
How does it affect my nerd life?
Making rockets isn't hard. Development costs are on order or less than a commercial jet liner, complexity is the same (the B787 cost $32 billion to develop and costs $250million each. Also there are ~30 large commercial planes made each month). The hard part is you have maybe one to a couple chances with a rocket, whereas a plane will have thousands attempts to correct any defects. That makes rockets look hard, but their not really, at least in the sense of being harder than any equivalent sized engineering project.
So what it comes down to is an economics problem Sending people is a very bad ROI. If you want to say we need to study humans in space in case of existential crisis, doing anything with a few dozen people over a few years won't matter much compared with the thousands of people years that could take place in a matter of a dozen or so months...if we really had to. That goes down a lot to statistics and reliability (which is the really hard part of rocket science).
After Apollo, NASA's next big goal was finding a sellable justification for itself.
Humans would live through a dinosaur rock encounter. Yeah, there will always e bigger rocks, but big rocks also hit Mars, every other planet, space stations and other big rocks.
The SSME are about as perfect a rocket engine that will ever be made. Only a H - F engine can be more energetic, but not worth the added complexity and the RS-25s came very close to maximum theoretical performance.
No one remembers the first person in Europe, Asia, Australia or the Americas. It's likely we don't know the first person on Antarctica either. Not to mention Africa.
I suggest there are other ways besides "sitting on our thumbs" that are orders of magnitude more feasible, economic and realizable. But I'm a rocket scientist, so what do I know?
There's are essentially inexhaustible natural resources here on Earth too.
Penrose
My nuclear physics teacher said the same thing about the SCSC back in the 80's/90's. I've even heard it said on popular science education shows.
Have you seen how big telescopes are named?
This was common assumption in the physics world for at least 20 years.
The SCSC was going to be 5x as powerful as the LHC. We got the ISS instead.
Looks like some idiot an Gizmag
-1: redundant
I did that for a music class that I enrolled in. Prof said guaranteed A to anyone who got 100% on the final, so I did. The class was all about memorizing the different types of scales and other music theory trivia. It was pretty interesting, but unfortunately, I don't remember any of it. I was taking complex analysis and quantum with Claude that semester and didn't have time to dick with anything else.