It seems like the question is asking how to cause an action in the future at a speciffic, pre-arranged time, with a minimum of human involvement.
How can you absolutely encrypt or otherwise protect your discovery, but guarantee its revealing at a certain future date even if you and everybody you know is long gone?
Fiction writers have used the device of the secret society to accomplish this goal. Round up a few easily influenced people, feed them the "sacred ritual" store the information in the Altar Of The Inner Circle, and wait for them to do as they have been told.
The social engineering effect should be much greater security than any other "clever" means. To keep your cult followers in line, you can even spread nasty rumors about them and set up satire in the mainstream media. Look at the "Stonecutters" episode of The Simpsons for an example of how to do this. Just because it's a big joke that the Iluminati are running the world in secret does not mean that they (or another simliar group) aren't doing just that.
On the other hand, there is no way I can think of to guarantee that your "discovery" won't be relased early, if ever. Copernicus did something of a similar fashion, but he had to rely on a friend to keep his letter safe until he was ready to release his opinion that the earth was not the Center of the Universe.
Also, it seems like the question is looking for a type of limited immortality. "How can my dead hand shape the future?"
It is interesting to note that in all the discussions of how nanotech will do this and nanotech will do that, I have never seen how we are going to power these little miracles.
An earlier story on batteries stated that batteries are the limiting factor in miniaturization. How do we propose to power these tiny things, when my TV remote is still powered by AA batteries? Last time I checked, they did not fit inside my bloodstream too well.
Other methods of getting these little gizmos to work would be to run them on glucose, mimicing mitochondria, or powering them remotely with low-frequency EM radiation. Either method is hard to implement and maintain.
In my book nanotech is still under the heading of "pipe dream" along with zero-point-energy, FTL travel, and immortality.
I'd like to see if the amount of energy needed to remove a given quantity of CO2 from the air is less than the carbon dioxide given off generating the power that runs the terraforming facility.
Considering that this is coming from Los Alamos, it might be reasonable to assume that the researchers are planning to power such a facilty with a fission plant.
Trees went out of fashion because they are vulnerable to the very problem we are trying to solve, global warming.
Most species of trees have limited hability zone, raise or lower the temperature or annual rainfall, and the trees die. Dead trees decompose and give off methane (also a greenhouse gas) and C02.
Also, when was the last time you saw engineers tearing up a freeway, parking lot, or strip mall to plant a forest? Current land-use trends are for less greenspace, not more.
Considering the history of diet pills (Fen Fen anyone?) I hope they test the long term effects of this drug before it goes public. I can just see years from now, after I've been taking thousands of doses of this miracle drug to keep my gut from rolling over my belt, finding out that my hair has turned a deep shade of purple, my liver has dissolved completely, and no matter what I eat, everything tastes like pickles.
New opportunity for Genre Writers
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
Even if this theory does not turn out to be true, I'm sure there are speculative fiction writers out there who are using "Quark Stars" and "Quark Matter" as a plot device in their next story.
Anyone want to take bets to see if this term shows up in next year's season of Enterprise or Farscape?
Lawyers are just today's version of hired mercnary armies.
Back in the good 'ol days, say, in the 17th century when Protestents and Catholics were making hash of the northern european countryside, noblemen would hire mercenary armies to invade and pillage each other's territory. When an army came by a town, the mercenary leader gave the inhabitants a choice; they would either: raid the treasury and granaries but otherwise leave the town alone; or kill, burn, rape and/or pillage everything in sight and then raid the treasury and granary.
Today, we have standing national armies that have nuclear weapons, much too big a stick to use against other petty lords and countrymen. Besides violence is messy.
Lawyers and the legal process (at least in the US) now occupy the niche that mercenaries did four hundred years ago. All you have to do if you want to attack your rival is a nice cadre of lawyers. And, lest you be attacked yourself, you also need to keep on retainer a few for defensive purposes. Today, sieges are waged by legal teams instead of armies. But one thing remains constant: the outcome largely depends not on who is right, but who is better funded.
The above remarks are just my OPINION, and are not intended to disparage any particular lawyer, mercenary, Protestent, Catholic, nobleman, the geobraphic area of Northern Europe, or any distributor of aquatic plant life.
Re:Wow, I remember way back when
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You are correct, I should have spent more time learning how to use spell checkers. Spelling has always been a problem for me, I use double letters when I shouldn't and forget double letters when I should. As far as spelling is concerned, I'm a looser.
Wow, I remember way back when
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Wow, I remember way back to my youth, I'd loose all sorts of productive time in college.
Now I get to loose productive time as an adult. At least I'll get paid this time.
Just because there is evidence of a few, "recent", cataclysmic water-flow events on the surface of Mars, why does this get introduced as "evidence of life"? The article says that there was at least one geothermal related surface water flow event 10M years ago. This does not necessairly lead to the conditions for life to develop.
On earth life developed just a few million years after the planet got cool enough to sustain it, but it still took millions of years. In a stable environment. With liquid water constantly available. And plenty of sunlight to pump energy into the system.
One flood on Mars, even every million years or so, does not a life-cradle make.
So there's water on Mars for us to exploit when we get there, good deal. But life on Mars, will have a tough time of it. And, yes, I know that different chemistries might produce life, but for the moment we have a pitifuly small sample size, so I'm going to have to stick with the good old carbon-based model for now.
Also if there is life on Mars, should we invent our own "prime directive" and leave the planet alone? After all in a few billion years, the stuff could evolve to multi-cellular organisms.
Given humanity's track record as a whole, I think not. We exploit things to easily to let ethics get in our way. If the first probes in the 60's and 70's had produced evidence of Little Green Men or any civillization at all, we'd be selling them Coke and Beenie Babies right now. To pay for it, we would have negoiated "mining rights" and hauled off all their easily extractable resources.
So what is all the excitement about? There's not much chance of life even with this latest story, and even if life does exist, we probably will kill it (or at best, put it in a bacterial zoo) the first chance we get.
Wow. At the risk of being entirely superficial, Kathleen is a very attractive woman. And from the look of her site, a woman of wit and sagacity.
The other picutes of Ms. Fent also hint that she is beautiful.
Good luck to you both!
Perhaps that's what the katana is for.
It's just lying there on the floor, and he took the picture just before he wielded his mighty sword and cut those overly-huge cable ties.
He left the long ends in place to show viewers how he mounted his components to the metal frame of the desk.
Slightly off topic, but you can perform your own FTL demo at home.
The classic example uses a bright searchlight reflecting of the clouds at night, but I suppose a laser pointer in a large auditiourm would work well too. The bright spot can be "moved" faster than light accross the clouds, just by moving the light source through a few minutes of arc.
Unfortunatly the spot is not a physical thing, just an image. No real information is moved FTL.
Very Shifmanesque, in my personal opinion.
Oh, wait, you didn't mention any names, so I shouldn't have either.
At least poor Bernie has succeded in one thing:
entering the online zeitgeist.
Slashdot Mirror
Not bad, considering I used to shovel about that much in quarters into the old games.
Come to think of it, I spend more than that now at places like Dave & Buster's but I don't notice it as much since they have the swipe cards.
This game convention is such a great idea. The kind of idea you kick yourself for not coming up with and exploiting yourself.
cut cows however you want
you will not find it
spam is parts of pigs
itty bitty pieces parts
pressed, and cooked in can.
nitpicks like leaves fall
in bastardized haiku form
your intent was clear.
Like a brisk fall breeze
a haiku invigorates
chasing spam away
Fiction writers have used the device of the secret society to accomplish this goal. Round up a few easily influenced people, feed them the "sacred ritual" store the information in the Altar Of The Inner Circle, and wait for them to do as they have been told.
The social engineering effect should be much greater security than any other "clever" means. To keep your cult followers in line, you can even spread nasty rumors about them and set up satire in the mainstream media. Look at the "Stonecutters" episode of The Simpsons for an example of how to do this. Just because it's a big joke that the Iluminati are running the world in secret does not mean that they (or another simliar group) aren't doing just that.
On the other hand, there is no way I can think of to guarantee that your "discovery" won't be relased early, if ever. Copernicus did something of a similar fashion, but he had to rely on a friend to keep his letter safe until he was ready to release his opinion that the earth was not the Center of the Universe.
Also, it seems like the question is looking for a type of limited immortality. "How can my dead hand shape the future?"
An earlier story on batteries stated that batteries are the limiting factor in miniaturization. How do we propose to power these tiny things, when my TV remote is still powered by AA batteries? Last time I checked, they did not fit inside my bloodstream too well.
Other methods of getting these little gizmos to work would be to run them on glucose, mimicing mitochondria, or powering them remotely with low-frequency EM radiation. Either method is hard to implement and maintain.
In my book nanotech is still under the heading of "pipe dream" along with zero-point-energy, FTL travel, and immortality.
I'd like to see if the amount of energy needed to remove a given quantity of CO2 from the air is less than the carbon dioxide given off generating the power that runs the terraforming facility.
Considering that this is coming from Los Alamos, it might be reasonable to assume that the researchers are planning to power such a facilty with a fission plant.
Most species of trees have limited hability zone, raise or lower the temperature or annual rainfall, and the trees die. Dead trees decompose and give off methane (also a greenhouse gas) and C02.
Also, when was the last time you saw engineers tearing up a freeway, parking lot, or strip mall to plant a forest? Current land-use trends are for less greenspace, not more.
Considering the history of diet pills (Fen Fen anyone?) I hope they test the long term effects of this drug before it goes public.
I can just see years from now, after I've been taking thousands of doses of this miracle drug to keep my gut from rolling over my belt, finding out that my hair has turned a deep shade of purple, my liver has dissolved completely, and no matter what I eat, everything tastes like pickles.
Even if this theory does not turn out to be true, I'm sure there are speculative fiction writers out there who are using "Quark Stars" and "Quark Matter" as a plot device in their next story.
Anyone want to take bets to see if this term shows up in next year's season of Enterprise or Farscape?
Back in the good 'ol days, say, in the 17th century when Protestents and Catholics were making hash of the northern european countryside, noblemen would hire mercenary armies to invade and pillage each other's territory. When an army came by a town, the mercenary leader gave the inhabitants a choice; they would either:
raid the treasury and granaries but otherwise leave the town alone; or
kill, burn, rape and/or pillage everything in sight and then raid the treasury and granary.
Today, we have standing national armies that have nuclear weapons, much too big a stick to use against other petty lords and countrymen. Besides violence is messy.
Lawyers and the legal process (at least in the US) now occupy the niche that mercenaries did four hundred years ago. All you have to do if you want to attack your rival is a nice cadre of lawyers. And, lest you be attacked yourself, you also need to keep on retainer a few for defensive purposes. Today, sieges are waged by legal teams instead of armies. But one thing remains constant: the outcome largely depends not on who is right, but who is better funded.
The above remarks are just my OPINION, and are not intended to disparage any particular lawyer, mercenary, Protestent, Catholic, nobleman, the geobraphic area of Northern Europe, or any distributor of aquatic plant life.
You are correct, I should have spent more time learning how to use spell checkers. Spelling has always been a problem for me, I use double letters when I shouldn't and forget double letters when I should. As far as spelling is concerned, I'm a looser.
Now I get to loose productive time as an adult. At least I'll get paid this time.
Just because there is evidence of a few, "recent", cataclysmic water-flow events on the surface of Mars, why does this get introduced as "evidence of life"? The article says that there was at least one geothermal related surface water flow event 10M years ago. This does not necessairly lead to the conditions for life to develop.
On earth life developed just a few million years after the planet got cool enough to sustain it, but it still took millions of years. In a stable environment. With liquid water constantly available. And plenty of sunlight to pump energy into the system.
One flood on Mars, even every million years or so, does not a life-cradle make.
So there's water on Mars for us to exploit when we get there, good deal. But life on Mars, will have a tough time of it. And, yes, I know that different chemistries might produce life, but for the moment we have a pitifuly small sample size, so I'm going to have to stick with the good old carbon-based model for now.
Also if there is life on Mars, should we invent our own "prime directive" and leave the planet alone? After all in a few billion years, the stuff could evolve to multi-cellular organisms.
Given humanity's track record as a whole, I think not. We exploit things to easily to let ethics get in our way. If the first probes in the 60's and 70's had produced evidence of Little Green Men or any civillization at all, we'd be selling them Coke and Beenie Babies right now. To pay for it, we would have negoiated "mining rights" and hauled off all their easily extractable resources.
So what is all the excitement about? There's not much chance of life even with this latest story, and even if life does exist, we probably will kill it (or at best, put it in a bacterial zoo) the first chance we get.
Wow. At the risk of being entirely superficial, Kathleen is a very attractive woman. And from the look of her site, a woman of wit and sagacity.
The other picutes of Ms. Fent also hint that she is beautiful.
Good luck to you both!
Perhaps that's what the katana is for.
It's just lying there on the floor, and he took the picture just before he wielded his mighty sword and cut those overly-huge cable ties.
He left the long ends in place to show viewers how he mounted his components to the metal frame of the desk.
Slightly off topic, but you can perform your own FTL demo at home.
The classic example uses a bright searchlight reflecting of the clouds at night, but I suppose a laser pointer in a large auditiourm would work well too. The bright spot can be "moved" faster than light accross the clouds, just by moving the light source through a few minutes of arc.
Unfortunatly the spot is not a physical thing, just an image. No real information is moved FTL.
Very Shifmanesque, in my personal opinion.
Oh, wait, you didn't mention any names, so I shouldn't have either.
At least poor Bernie has succeded in one thing:
entering the online zeitgeist.