Not ridiculous. He was arrested, then spent years in court trying to get the police to do the right thing. What should he have done instead? Stopped when the time he invested became ridiculous? Then they would never change their behavior, and our rights would be even worse off than they are.
It seems likely the two competing swarms should be obvious... and assuming a speed of light limit, it seems more of a race to reach the resources than a fight to get there. If my 10kg VNM can get there a year before yours, it will kick the ass of your fleet of 1*10^6kgs of VNM warriors when they get there.
And I think the last two options fall under the "some significant new understanding" clause.
But obviously the earth can support many millions of tons of self reproducing machines (it already supports them).
If an enemy decides to attack me and already controls earth, he could mobilize all that against me. Surely it's worth sending a few pounds, or hundreds of pounds, of my own VNM (Von Neumann Machines) to take trillions of pounds of yummy matter for myself?
Please read the whole thing. This is not about them sampling Earth, this is about them disassembling it to build something useful (to them) with automated self-directed machines (that they can also direct with signed messages, etc.)
If it's possible, and you don't do it, someone else might. If you have a disagreement with that other someone, they're likely to win:-)
They should already be here regardless of FTL travel.
Assume there are intelligent, technologically oriented aliens. * Surely if we have been around for four billion years, many of them must have achieved a reasonable level of technology 100 million years before us. * Surely in the next million years we will be capable of building a system that could reproduce given the energy and typical raw materials around a significant fraction of stars. Such a system could also be made to build other things based on instructions sent to it. * Such a system could use laser driven solar sails and/or bussard ramjets to achieve near lightspeed travel. * This system would fill in a sphere of space with the radius being essentially the time it takes light to reach from the center of the sphere to the outer edge since the expansion started. * Surely at least one ET which has the power and the inclination to build such a system and set it loose on the universe. This ET should control much of the matter within 100 million light years of it.
Why don't we see evidence?
This is all projected given the miniscule understanding of what's possible that we have from the ~200 years since the industrial revolution, only 500 years since automated printing became well established. What would be the real capabilities of an intelligent race that had a million years of tech development under its belt?
Either: * they're not there * some powerful force is keeping us from knowing about them * some significant new understanding one gets with technological development changes the rules somehow and makes this option not attractive
Or possibly: * what's technologically possible is vastly more limited than seems reasonable given our current understanding
Hmm, makes sense. Water is about 1000x as dense as air, and has 4 times the specific heat. The top 10 feet of water would then be about as "heat massive" as 4000 feet of air at surface pressure.
I hadn't thought about the Sun's radiation being essentially black box, but I can see that it is so and the interesting implications such as guessing the temp from the color.
Thanks for commenting about the score. I not only see my starting score as 1 in my comments, but also when I look at stories. As long as other people see them at 2, I guess I don't care.
Does anyone know what happened to my karma bonus? "No Karma Bonus" is unchecked, and my karma still shows as Excellent, but posts start at score: 1.
Oh, and some more math: it looks as if when you take the sphere around the sun circumscribed by the Earth's orbit, Earth takes up about 1/(2 billion) of it. So if the sun is radiating in all directions equally, it radiates about 2 billion times 16,000 tonnes = 32 trillion tonnes = 3.2 * 10^13 kilograms each year JUST IN ENERGY, ignoring particles. The sun weighs 2 * 10^30 kilograms.
Once again I expected the math to show a proportionally shocking amount of the sun being radiated in energy, but it turns out the sun is just really fucking big.
Thanks, I was going to go through those same calculations, because I couldn't believe the numbers. In fact, I double checked your numbers (because I still had trouble believing) and came up with the same thing.
It's shocking to me that the energy accumulated by Earth from solar radiation is measurable in tonnes! Remember that the devastation from a nuke comes from a fraction of 1% of the mass of a relatively tiny piece of uranium.
To add a little more math, the atmosphere weighs roughly 5*10^21 grams. The specific heat of air is about 1 joule per gram-kelvin, so the solar radiance of the earth should raise the temperature 200 degrees centigrade each year if none was reflected or absorbed into the ground/water!
Even if you only assume the mass that this report claims is absorbed, it would add 2 degrees centigrade each year. Obviously some is absorbed into the ground, but either way it's clearly unsustainable. At some temperature, the Earth must radiate more than it is absorbing, otherwise we would burn up.
It seems clear to me that the temperature of the earth is going to be vary wildly depending on albedo/reemission, which life on earth affects by varying the composition of the atmosphere and surface reflection. This must be an influence on evolution - over the long run, organisms that tend to pull the temperature up when it gets too low and down when it gets too high would tend to succeed. By which I mean organisms that don't fit this profile would tend to wipe out virtually all life on earth, including themselves.
Maybe this is the cause of some of the extinction events in the fossil layers? It seems unbelievable that this hasn't happened before - some microscopic organism produces methane or CO2 in bulk and is very successful, then succeeds so well it fucks up the ecosystem for everybody.
It also looks like this is an existential test for humanity - maybe we can be the first multicellular organism to influence the temperature feedback loop enough to wipe ourselves out. Although I think it's more likely we'll just screw things up so badly lots of us die, until we lose the ability to influence the feedback loop enough to break it or we finally get the sense that our actions matter globally.
Note that they give a bunch of circumstances in which they will use your private information, but then they add in "or as *allowed* by law" which means they can do absolutely anything with your information that isn't illegal.
Somehow I think people misread it as "or as required by law" which is an altogether different thing.
Hrm, I don't remember that from 3e, or from 2e for that matter. In 1st, it was kind of hard to miss, because the rules were not complete, and in some cases sort of conflicted (see the other thread about initiative).
I can point out explicitly where the 1st ed DMG said that the DM has final say, even when his say conflicts with the rules as written.
Oh yeah, I'm a big nerd. But here (Seattle) & now it's apparently more acceptable to be a nerd.
I certainly don't fool myself that I would be cool by the average HSer's standards. (Nor would I want to be.) In fact it quite surprised me to hear my son comment that his friends complained their parents weren't as cool as me;-)
Yeah, I'm definitely not following all of those rules religiously. In fact, initiative is very simplified.
The great things about 1st ed in my opinion is that * it is more about letting different playstyles have fun rather than pounding all the bumpy bits off of each choice (race, class, etc) until they're all homogeneous for the sake of "balance" * it explicitly points out that your game is your game. The DM is there to make sure the players are challenged and have fun, and the rules are there to help the DM meet that. If the DM decides that different rules will be more fun for his players, it is not just his right but his obligation to change them.
Explain where in the constitution freedom of speech is limited. I'm not sure how libel and slander laws are even defensible under the US Constitution. Not that I disagree with them, I'd be happy to see a reasonable amendment to the constitution that disallowed slander & libel.
I am NOT happy with how so many people (including entire government institutions) treat the constitution as meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately common 3 d glasses are circularly polarized not linearly. :-(
Not ridiculous. He was arrested, then spent years in court trying to get the police to do the right thing. What should he have done instead? Stopped when the time he invested became ridiculous? Then they would never change their behavior, and our rights would be even worse off than they are.
Solar energy incident on the earth in a year: (100 watts) * 24 hours * 365 * pi * (6 400 000^2) = 4.05804097 Ã-- 10^23 joules
160 exajoules = 1.6 x 10^20 joules
So we get more than 20,000 as much energy as we currently use in solar. Assuming we could capture it...
The earth doesn't need that energy. The sun puts out enough energy to push 3 * 10^11 kilograms of matter to 99% of the speed of light every year. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2651333&cid=38908157
It seems likely the two competing swarms should be obvious... and assuming a speed of light limit, it seems more of a race to reach the resources than a fight to get there. If my 10kg VNM can get there a year before yours, it will kick the ass of your fleet of 1*10^6kgs of VNM warriors when they get there.
And I think the last two options fall under the "some significant new understanding" clause.
But obviously the earth can support many millions of tons of self reproducing machines (it already supports them).
If an enemy decides to attack me and already controls earth, he could mobilize all that against me. Surely it's worth sending a few pounds, or hundreds of pounds, of my own VNM (Von Neumann Machines) to take trillions of pounds of yummy matter for myself?
Please read the whole thing. This is not about them sampling Earth, this is about them disassembling it to build something useful (to them) with automated self-directed machines (that they can also direct with signed messages, etc.)
If it's possible, and you don't do it, someone else might. If you have a disagreement with that other someone, they're likely to win :-)
So why didn't anyone?
They should already be here regardless of FTL travel.
Assume there are intelligent, technologically oriented aliens.
* Surely if we have been around for four billion years, many of them must have achieved a reasonable level of technology 100 million years before us.
* Surely in the next million years we will be capable of building a system that could reproduce given the energy and typical raw materials around a significant fraction of stars. Such a system could also be made to build other things based on instructions sent to it.
* Such a system could use laser driven solar sails and/or bussard ramjets to achieve near lightspeed travel.
* This system would fill in a sphere of space with the radius being essentially the time it takes light to reach from the center of the sphere to the outer edge since the expansion started.
* Surely at least one ET which has the power and the inclination to build such a system and set it loose on the universe.
This ET should control much of the matter within 100 million light years of it.
Why don't we see evidence?
This is all projected given the miniscule understanding of what's possible that we have from the ~200 years since the industrial revolution, only 500 years since automated printing became well established. What would be the real capabilities of an intelligent race that had a million years of tech development under its belt?
Either:
* they're not there
* some powerful force is keeping us from knowing about them
* some significant new understanding one gets with technological development changes the rules somehow and makes this option not attractive
Or possibly:
* what's technologically possible is vastly more limited than seems reasonable given our current understanding
Or maybe some combination of the above.
I think you are still thinking of trademark.
And the link you provide is to the copyright registration for the source of a *program* that guy wrote. The name of that program is EMAIL.
That link is not to a copyright on the word EMAIL.
A single word is not copyrightable. It's possible he was the first to *trademark* the term, though.
Hmm, makes sense. Water is about 1000x as dense as air, and has 4 times the specific heat. The top 10 feet of water would then be about as "heat massive" as 4000 feet of air at surface pressure.
I hadn't thought about the Sun's radiation being essentially black box, but I can see that it is so and the interesting implications such as guessing the temp from the color.
Thanks for commenting about the score. I not only see my starting score as 1 in my comments, but also when I look at stories. As long as other people see them at 2, I guess I don't care.
Does anyone know what happened to my karma bonus? "No Karma Bonus" is unchecked, and my karma still shows as Excellent, but posts start at score: 1.
Oh, and some more math: it looks as if when you take the sphere around the sun circumscribed by the Earth's orbit, Earth takes up about 1/(2 billion) of it. So if the sun is radiating in all directions equally, it radiates about 2 billion times 16,000 tonnes = 32 trillion tonnes = 3.2 * 10^13 kilograms each year JUST IN ENERGY, ignoring particles. The sun weighs 2 * 10^30 kilograms.
Once again I expected the math to show a proportionally shocking amount of the sun being radiated in energy, but it turns out the sun is just really fucking big.
Thanks, I was going to go through those same calculations, because I couldn't believe the numbers. In fact, I double checked your numbers (because I still had trouble believing) and came up with the same thing.
It's shocking to me that the energy accumulated by Earth from solar radiation is measurable in tonnes! Remember that the devastation from a nuke comes from a fraction of 1% of the mass of a relatively tiny piece of uranium.
To add a little more math, the atmosphere weighs roughly 5*10^21 grams. The specific heat of air is about 1 joule per gram-kelvin, so the solar radiance of the earth should raise the temperature 200 degrees centigrade each year if none was reflected or absorbed into the ground/water!
Even if you only assume the mass that this report claims is absorbed, it would add 2 degrees centigrade each year. Obviously some is absorbed into the ground, but either way it's clearly unsustainable. At some temperature, the Earth must radiate more than it is absorbing, otherwise we would burn up.
It seems clear to me that the temperature of the earth is going to be vary wildly depending on albedo/reemission, which life on earth affects by varying the composition of the atmosphere and surface reflection. This must be an influence on evolution - over the long run, organisms that tend to pull the temperature up when it gets too low and down when it gets too high would tend to succeed. By which I mean organisms that don't fit this profile would tend to wipe out virtually all life on earth, including themselves.
Maybe this is the cause of some of the extinction events in the fossil layers? It seems unbelievable that this hasn't happened before - some microscopic organism produces methane or CO2 in bulk and is very successful, then succeeds so well it fucks up the ecosystem for everybody.
It also looks like this is an existential test for humanity - maybe we can be the first multicellular organism to influence the temperature feedback loop enough to wipe ourselves out. Although I think it's more likely we'll just screw things up so badly lots of us die, until we lose the ability to influence the feedback loop enough to break it or we finally get the sense that our actions matter globally.
I do have numbers; they were easy to get. Support was evenly mixed.
The original sponsor was R. There were 32 cosponsors (including the original sponsor), 16 D and 16 R.
It is true that more republicans withdrew support than dems: 6 R withdrew vs 2 D.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261
Most privacy policies are just as bad as the "worst" privacy policy: https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=privacy+%22or+as+allowed+by+law%22
Note that they give a bunch of circumstances in which they will use your private information, but then they add in "or as *allowed* by law" which means they can do absolutely anything with your information that isn't illegal.
Somehow I think people misread it as "or as required by law" which is an altogether different thing.
Yeah, I'm familiar with Chainmail (thirdhand only, I haven't seen a copy).
I'm also jealous.
Wow, I'm out-pedanted.
Well done! And thanks for the education.
Hrm, I don't remember that from 3e, or from 2e for that matter. In 1st, it was kind of hard to miss, because the rules were not complete, and in some cases sort of conflicted (see the other thread about initiative).
I can point out explicitly where the 1st ed DMG said that the DM has final say, even when his say conflicts with the rules as written.
Well, I said *his friends* said I was cool. I doubt he feels the same way ;-)
I have a copy of (most of) 0th edition at home (the "little brown books" that came out before Basic).
And if it's made from animal hide, it's vellum, not parchment.
Oh yeah, I'm a big nerd. But here (Seattle) & now it's apparently more acceptable to be a nerd.
I certainly don't fool myself that I would be cool by the average HSer's standards. (Nor would I want to be.) In fact it quite surprised me to hear my son comment that his friends complained their parents weren't as cool as me ;-)
Yeah, I'm definitely not following all of those rules religiously. In fact, initiative is very simplified.
The great things about 1st ed in my opinion is that
* it is more about letting different playstyles have fun rather than pounding all the bumpy bits off of each choice (race, class, etc) until they're all homogeneous for the sake of "balance"
* it explicitly points out that your game is your game. The DM is there to make sure the players are challenged and have fun, and the rules are there to help the DM meet that. If the DM decides that different rules will be more fun for his players, it is not just his right but his obligation to change them.
I'm running a 1st edition game for my 16 year old and five of his friends >:-)
Shockingly, somehow one of the major factors in me being derided as a nerd in HS has turned me into "the cool dad" now that my kid's in HS.
Explain where in the constitution freedom of speech is limited. I'm not sure how libel and slander laws are even defensible under the US Constitution. Not that I disagree with them, I'd be happy to see a reasonable amendment to the constitution that disallowed slander & libel.
I am NOT happy with how so many people (including entire government institutions) treat the constitution as meaningless.
When the hell did "you'r e an idiot" posts start qualifying for an upvote of any kind?