No more damn toner! Just change the paper. And, presumably, any paper that is standard size would work in one of these printers, there wouldn't be any propriatary paper. You'd be able to keep using the same printer until it mechanically fails, could probably keep using the same printer for a decade.
We don't have maps of the interconnects at the moment. Hence, once we have said maps, building actual simulations would be possible.
The molecular scanner I have in mind works like this : there's a tiny arm that grabs a chunk off the surface and pulls it into the scanner. Various molecular scale sensors look at the outside of the chunk and deduce the elements it is composed of. The chunk gets disposed of and another one is ripped free.
The device that is doing all this is a subunit that is built of merely millions or billions of individual atoms, thus it is extremely small. It is attached to a large machine that supplies it with cooling and power, gets rid of wastes, etc. (it is not a freely floating robot)
Anyways, you could fit trillions of these subunits on a plane. So while it would be incredibly slow to map a person's brain a few atoms at a time, you would be doing so massively in parallel.
Anyways, the brain is mapped to atomic level : for the most part, you would have a map of where every single atom originally was in the brain. So yes, you'd know about neurotransmitter and ion gradients in every synapse. To prepare the sample, the patient would be put to sleep while their brain is still perfectly healthy, and given various ice inhibitors and other chemicals to prevent crystals forming. Strong magnetic fields and rapid cooling might also be used to prepare a frozen sample. (the person would have to be someone who is dying from a terminal illness. obviously, a successful molecular scan of them might allow a copy of them to 'live again' decades later, once the simulation technology is perfected)
High end electron microscopes. Atomic force microscopes. Both can look at the surface layer of an object. I'm just proposing using some method to remove a layer and continue scanning. (most likely, as part of the same process)
This is not implausibly difficult, here, and it would be surprising if in the future it turned out to be impractical.
An antimatter reactor doesn't have the problem of a fusion reactor where it might not produce enough energy to be worth running. Obviously, mass annihilation releases tremendous energy. The complex part would be the antimatter isolation and feed systems.
I will grant you the possibility that the risk of one blowing up could always remain so high that antimatter remained impractical.
Yes. Also, it may have taken ~3 billion years for life to random walk it's way to our capabilities. Had, for instance, the dinosaurs not suffered an extinction event, their lineage may have never evolved sonnet writing and spaceship building, either.
Still, if it only would have taken 1 more million years to go from where we are today to total control of all the matter in this galaxy (and with expeditions to neighboring galaxies in route) it seems odd that 14 billion years has passed and no one else has done it.
With that said, known physics suggests that we can intelligently design machinery that can operate in space, using solar power, and convert currently inactive rocks into machinery. We would be able to develop a super form of our own sonnet writing/space ship building intelligence to plan and operate the machinery.
Thus, the entire universe is, from a materials and energy standpoint, a petri dish full of metric tons of usable nutrients and no competing organisms as far as we can see.
You'd think that. Let me tell you a little secret : every amino acid in YOU was placed atom by atom.
But, yes, there would be an error rate. It could be made pretty low, though. 1 in millions or billions of atoms placed.
Obviously, this is not a drawback for most machinery you could envision building at the molecular level. If you're building million core processors, 1 or two dead cores is not an issue. Etc.
Ah, but there's nothing in physical laws prohibiting these things.
Nanotechnology? Life is a working example.
Antimatter as a power source? Obviously, getting the antimatter to react is the easy part. Sufficient supplies of the antimatter? Again, easy. We do know how to produce it. (free electron lasers)
Bussard Ramscoop? Ok I'll give you that one. We don't know if we can make the electromagnetic fields strong enough.
Uh, no. You fail. Most of the complexity of molecular biology is because the fundamental parts, amino acids, share a limited codebase due to billions of years of version lock-in. Essentially, life has been stuck on the same amino acids for billions of years now, and in order to do complex things it has to use kludgey work-arounds that are extremely complex.
Furthermore, organic life has to operate in solution, at liquid temperatures, which is an inherently chaotic environment, and not only self replicate and self repair, but do so in an environment where numerous complex interactions are required to survive.
Molecular manufacturing machinery will not be subject to any of these constraints. The conditions will be extremely specialized, and each part rationally designed to work, then rigorously tested by itself. Rather than relying on dynamic stability and self correction like natural enzymes do, we'll rely on inherent stiffness and predictability at low temperatures.
Do you think that the human mind is not a physical object that performs computations? That said computations cannot be replicated in an equivalent device?
There are numerous papers and journal articles in the literature where accurate simulations and even replacements of pieces of brain tissue in rats have been done. Unless you simply disbelieve in evolution, you must realize that the hardware in a human skull is merely more complex, not different. If the rat simulations are accurate, reaching human level is merely a matter of scale.
Do you notice that the world 100 years ago was incomprehensibly different than it is today?
And the concept of the singularity is so simple a child could understand it. Using what we know now, given the mathematical operation we think a human synapse is performing each time, we think that modern hardware running at 5ghz today would be able to simulate a human brain about 10 million times quicker than it currently operates at. The actual hardware to do this, if built using today's tech, would probably have to be very, very large, but no one is going to try to simulate entire human minds for another decade or two.
Now, for the sake of argument, imagine YOU woke up in a simple virtual reality as a simulated entity. You would perceive our world as moving so slowly that time is virtually frozen. If you could read books from a library, you would be able to finish every book human beings had ever written within a relatively small amount of real world time.
Given millions of years to think, and the ability to open up an editor application to edit your own neural structures, do YOU think you would gradually become super-intelligent?
The starship isn't a robot, it's crewed by sentient entities.
Here's the roadmap :
1. We develop molecular manufacturing. That, simply put, is a small machine that can place a single atom at a time over and over again like a 3d printer. The machine is small enough that it itself can be produced by itself. Cells do this 24/7 with far more kludgey methods than our tech will use. (vacuum chamber + low temperature + supply of pure substrate + energy supply)
2. We then develop a machine that can cut a 3d object apart to determine it's structure, produced using meolecular manufacturing technology. Sort of a gigantic array of trillions of atomic force microscopes working in parallel.
3. We cut apart preserved and frozen human brains using this machine to get a true mapping of of human mind. With exact knowledge of how the brain's particles are connected, building artificial hardware to mimic it will be practical.
4. These artificial simulations of once living persons will run at thinking speeds constrained by the hardware, which will be probably millions of times faster than slow and inefficient human cells. If YOU could think for the apparent equivalent of a million years per earth year, you could probably learn every skill any human has in the first few millenia, then ???
This is called super-intelligence. Now, it is assumed that if someone had this kind of time and intelligence, they could turn it to revising themselves, creating an even smarter version of themselves, and so on. This explosion of increasing intelligence (til you hit some limit defined by physical laws, most likely) combined with exponentially increasing machinery is called the Singularity.
Anyways, with these kinds of resources, building starships would be child's play because you in fact would have practically infinite time, energy, and materials.
Well my assumption is that if, say, 1000 years from now, 100 separate entities have the resources to start on this kind of expansion. You know, different corporations, political entities, group minds, whatever.
Only one of them has to start it, and in another million years, the galaxy will be nothing but copies of that entity.
Basically, over the long run, if life can replicate exponentially it will do so, because the variants of life that fail or refuse to do so are quickly swept aside.
However, yes, this Fermi paradox hints that we ARE missing something huge. Maybe it really is a simulation, and we can escape or crash it. Etc.
Here's the best starship concept I have come up with, based upon the assumption that there are no major undiscovered principles of physics. (aka no way to cheat basic material science or travel faster than light or cheat conservation of momentum, and relativity holds)
Technology needed : with a form of nanotechnology known as "molecular manufacturing", you can produce anything of any size with control over every atomic bond. The only limits are materials and energy. You can also deconstruct any frozen object and determine it's molecular structure.
For departing Sol, use mass drivers. Either build a gigantic mass driver that can accelerate the entire starship in one go, or give the starship a mass driver that can "catch" pellets of iron fired from a smaller one you leave back at Sol.
Either way, you want to accelerate to the desired speed as rapidly as possible. This means hundreds or thousands of Gs of acceleration. The ship is mostly solid state at this point.
At 90% of the speed of the light, the ship cruises until it gets close enough to the destination star. At this point, it reconfigures the matter about the ship into a bussard ramscoop and uses this as a brake to slow down. This way, you use free floating interstellar particles as the reaction mass instead of mass carried aboard the ship. Antimatter is used as a power source, the antimatter being burned inside a power reactor inside the ship. (antimatter does not work very well as a direct source of propulsion)
The same nanotechnology used to construct the ship can also conduct perfect repairs and quickly respond to damage (given sufficient materials and energy). That way, during the many years of travel time when the ship is cruising through the space between the stars, you can repair damage from particle impacts. Also, the ship splits into dozens of pieces separated by thousands of kilometers, enough spacing so that if part of the ship collides with a large mass at 90% of the speed of light, the rest of the ship survives.
Once at the destination star and decelerated to rest relative to the star, the ship finds a small asteroid or comet near the star. It docks with it and uses the asteroid/comet as raw materials to begin expanding infrastructure. The star provides an energy source. With exponential growth, each asteroid or comet consumed increases the infrastructure (aka a swarm of various types of robots) available, allowing bigger objects to be consumed. Eventually, there would be enough equipment built to start tearing down moons for raw materials, and eventually even planets.
Once all the mass in the star system is consumed and converted into more robots, processors, etc more ships are built and sent off like seeds to more stars to continue the process.
In principle, the entire galaxy would be nothing but dyson spheres within a million years or so.
The ultimate Fermi paradox is why has this not happened yet. We are nearing the technological capability to do this. I think we will have molecular manufacturing within 100 years. Once we find a way to copy the complexity of human brains to far faster solid state circuitry, we will create super-intelligent beings who would have the ability to solve all the engineering problems within a matter of years. If the Singularity happens, then after that event this kind of expansion would be expected to start right away. Worst case scenario, within 1000 years this should start happening.
Ok, I get that this baby is running on beta hardware. But 16 hours? Can anyone here venture a guess as to why? No matter how sllloooowww the CPUs, or how inefficient the code, 16 hours isn't plausible.
So, it must refer to something the hardware is doing. Still, 16 hours? Thermodynamics is normally quicker than that for a machine that can fit on a truck. That's an awfully long time for it to be heating up or cooling down.
Any RF engineers here know a reason for this? My best guess is that components of this device rely on superconductivity, and require very slow peltier coolers to bring the operating temperature down to the range of operation. I've seen radios sold on ebay that use superconductors for parts of the RF elements.
Oh, also, an automated car cannot become scared or panic. If a skid or spin happens, and the car has the sensors and software to detect it, it will immediately and rationally perform programmed actions to mitigate it. It will turn into the spin, etc.
What is REALLY needed is a law to mitigate liability risks for automated cars. Here's how a fair law might read :
All operators of automated vehicles are required to buy additional insurance. If someone is harmed by an automated vehicle malfunction, a panel is empowered to compensate the individual with a FIXED amount of money depending on the severity of the injury and or death. This is how vaccine injuries are handled : if a vaccine harms someone, they get a certain amount of injury depending on the risk.
Neutral, third party laboratories would be paid to examine the 'black boxes' from automated cars after a crash and present their findings to the panel. The panel would be required by law to make a decision within a certain amount of time (~180 days sounds about right)
Advantages :
1. Lawyers eat up a large chunk of the money when litigation is allowed. This way, most of the money goes to the victims.
2. Everyone gets some compensation money instead of most getting nothing and a few hitting the jackpot
3. Faster decisions instead of lawsuits that take 5-10 years.
Disadvantages :
1. Panel can be unfair or biased and little can be done
2. The amounts of money seem low compared to jury awards for successful lawsuits. Lose a hand, it might be 100k not a million, etc.
3. Legislators who are lawyers have to write the legislation for this.
The reason to do this is the same reason we do vaccines, but it would save a LOT more lives. Automobiles kill far more people than the number who would die if we stopped most vaccinations. Automated cars will occasionally malfunction and kill someone. However, on the aggregate, the total deaths per passenger mile caused by automated vehicles will very likely be more than 10 times or more lower. Automated vehicles have short reaction delays, no need to take risks, ability to see in all directions they have sensors pointing at the same time, can predict a crash is about to occur and take mitigating actions (pre-firing the airbags, etc), activates the brakes quickly enough to avoid pileups, etc.
The thing is, an automated car will have software bugs, and will occasionally make mistakes. Maybe a good model will be as good a driver as the average driver on their best day. EXCEPT, an automated car's systems cannot become distracted, board, drunk, or fall asleep. I suspect that this advantage over millions of miles will prove to be huge. Sure, the average human might be smarter, but we don't give our best effort during every minute of the many hours we drive.
1. Requires no materials we don't already have 2. Would allow for continuous launches. This tube could be used every 15 minutes or so for another payload 3. Fairly massively spaceships could be launched this way 4. Once you get into LEO, getting around in space is relatively easy and cheap.
Downsides : the forces involved here are extreme. There's enormous magnetic fields, the whole structure is suspended in the air, it's over 1000 miles long, and depends on various complex pieces of tech to not rip itself apart. If the vacuum leaks or the plasma window fails or a magnet gets too much current, a chunk or even the whole damn launcher could spectacularly fail.
In addition, the estimated costs have got to be a factor of 10 too optimistic. 60 billion dollars? For something constructed of tens of thousands of miles of superconducting cable and a structure made to aerospace engineering tolerances that is 1000 miles long? Even 600 billion sounds optimistic for something that large.
So, after making some of the best sci-fi action movies ever filmed, James Cameron kicks back with some dives to the bottom of the ocean.
You know what the best part of it is? Nearly every dive he has done has been paid for by others. After filming titanic, he did a bunch of dives as "research" for his next movie, Avatar. I must have missed the underwater scenes in that film...
Anyways, the beauty of doing it this way is : 1. He gets to charge the investors in the movie for the costs of the underwater dives AND still receive his full salary 2. Since research is a business expense, neither JC nor the movie studio pay any income taxes on the money used to fund this hobby 3. Since he's bringing an IMAX camera along for the current endeavor, WE'RE collectively going to pay the bills for the expedition!
Anyways, stuff like this is how rich people get even richer. I mean sure he could probably write a check for the millions of dollars these trips costs, but that's not how rich people roll...
With all that said, I don't see anything wrong with his actions. Mr. Cameron didn't write the tax laws, and unlikely many wealthy people, he started from nothing, and he created something to earn his wealth. It's become fashionable to criticize Avatar, but it was one of the best looking movies ever filmed, and had a solid story.
My point is, the authorities are not going to negotiate if they think their chance of destroying the nuke is higher than the bomber's chance of setting it off is. Well, mostly, big institutions and/or authority figures like to minimize risk they can be blamed for. Since doing something to disable the nuke is rolling the dice, they would avoid rolling the die unless they felt there were no other options.
Each and every advance in RF technology, the final signal becomes more and more chaotic. The entropy rises and rises as we cram more and more data into the available frequencies.
Also, the broadcasts have to become more directional and they use less energy.
Anyways, it's pretty easy to extrapolate on this trend. What will the RF emissions from earth look like in 1000 years, when we've developed radio technology to the physical limits? I suspect that those signals will be completely indistinguishable from noise from the reference of an observer located at another star.
The catch is, what happens if the astronauts become incapacitated or are forced to abandon the station without flipping a switch to put the station on to remote ground control? More than likely, there is a way for the station on the ground to remotely broadcast commands to control the crucial systems on the station. (the power systems and all of the rocket engines, as well as perhaps cooling and life support)
That would not end peacefully. The counter to a backpack nuke would be to hit the location where the nuke is with a large enough explosion to disable the nuke, before it can go off.
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No more damn toner! Just change the paper. And, presumably, any paper that is standard size would work in one of these printers, there wouldn't be any propriatary paper. You'd be able to keep using the same printer until it mechanically fails, could probably keep using the same printer for a decade.
We don't have maps of the interconnects at the moment. Hence, once we have said maps, building actual simulations would be possible.
The molecular scanner I have in mind works like this : there's a tiny arm that grabs a chunk off the surface and pulls it into the scanner. Various molecular scale sensors look at the outside of the chunk and deduce the elements it is composed of. The chunk gets disposed of and another one is ripped free.
The device that is doing all this is a subunit that is built of merely millions or billions of individual atoms, thus it is extremely small. It is attached to a large machine that supplies it with cooling and power, gets rid of wastes, etc. (it is not a freely floating robot)
Anyways, you could fit trillions of these subunits on a plane. So while it would be incredibly slow to map a person's brain a few atoms at a time, you would be doing so massively in parallel.
Anyways, the brain is mapped to atomic level : for the most part, you would have a map of where every single atom originally was in the brain. So yes, you'd know about neurotransmitter and ion gradients in every synapse. To prepare the sample, the patient would be put to sleep while their brain is still perfectly healthy, and given various ice inhibitors and other chemicals to prevent crystals forming. Strong magnetic fields and rapid cooling might also be used to prepare a frozen sample. (the person would have to be someone who is dying from a terminal illness. obviously, a successful molecular scan of them might allow a copy of them to 'live again' decades later, once the simulation technology is perfected)
High end electron microscopes. Atomic force microscopes. Both can look at the surface layer of an object. I'm just proposing using some method to remove a layer and continue scanning. (most likely, as part of the same process)
This is not implausibly difficult, here, and it would be surprising if in the future it turned out to be impractical.
An antimatter reactor doesn't have the problem of a fusion reactor where it might not produce enough energy to be worth running. Obviously, mass annihilation releases tremendous energy. The complex part would be the antimatter isolation and feed systems.
I will grant you the possibility that the risk of one blowing up could always remain so high that antimatter remained impractical.
Yes. Also, it may have taken ~3 billion years for life to random walk it's way to our capabilities. Had, for instance, the dinosaurs not suffered an extinction event, their lineage may have never evolved sonnet writing and spaceship building, either.
Still, if it only would have taken 1 more million years to go from where we are today to total control of all the matter in this galaxy (and with expeditions to neighboring galaxies in route) it seems odd that 14 billion years has passed and no one else has done it.
With that said, known physics suggests that we can intelligently design machinery that can operate in space, using solar power, and convert currently inactive rocks into machinery. We would be able to develop a super form of our own sonnet writing/space ship building intelligence to plan and operate the machinery.
Thus, the entire universe is, from a materials and energy standpoint, a petri dish full of metric tons of usable nutrients and no competing organisms as far as we can see.
Pretty spooky to see that dish empty.
You'd think that. Let me tell you a little secret : every amino acid in YOU was placed atom by atom.
But, yes, there would be an error rate. It could be made pretty low, though. 1 in millions or billions of atoms placed.
Obviously, this is not a drawback for most machinery you could envision building at the molecular level. If you're building million core processors, 1 or two dead cores is not an issue. Etc.
Ah, but there's nothing in physical laws prohibiting these things.
Nanotechnology? Life is a working example.
Antimatter as a power source? Obviously, getting the antimatter to react is the easy part. Sufficient supplies of the antimatter? Again, easy. We do know how to produce it. (free electron lasers)
Bussard Ramscoop? Ok I'll give you that one. We don't know if we can make the electromagnetic fields strong enough.
Separating the ship into separate ships? Please.
The crew is solid state.
Uh, no. You fail. Most of the complexity of molecular biology is because the fundamental parts, amino acids, share a limited codebase due to billions of years of version lock-in. Essentially, life has been stuck on the same amino acids for billions of years now, and in order to do complex things it has to use kludgey work-arounds that are extremely complex.
Furthermore, organic life has to operate in solution, at liquid temperatures, which is an inherently chaotic environment, and not only self replicate and self repair, but do so in an environment where numerous complex interactions are required to survive.
Molecular manufacturing machinery will not be subject to any of these constraints. The conditions will be extremely specialized, and each part rationally designed to work, then rigorously tested by itself. Rather than relying on dynamic stability and self correction like natural enzymes do, we'll rely on inherent stiffness and predictability at low temperatures.
I don't understand your viewpoint, at all.
Do you think that the human mind is not a physical object that performs computations? That said computations cannot be replicated in an equivalent device?
There are numerous papers and journal articles in the literature where accurate simulations and even replacements of pieces of brain tissue in rats have been done. Unless you simply disbelieve in evolution, you must realize that the hardware in a human skull is merely more complex, not different. If the rat simulations are accurate, reaching human level is merely a matter of scale.
Do you notice that the world 100 years ago was incomprehensibly different than it is today?
And the concept of the singularity is so simple a child could understand it. Using what we know now, given the mathematical operation we think a human synapse is performing each time, we think that modern hardware running at 5ghz today would be able to simulate a human brain about 10 million times quicker than it currently operates at. The actual hardware to do this, if built using today's tech, would probably have to be very, very large, but no one is going to try to simulate entire human minds for another decade or two.
Now, for the sake of argument, imagine YOU woke up in a simple virtual reality as a simulated entity. You would perceive our world as moving so slowly that time is virtually frozen. If you could read books from a library, you would be able to finish every book human beings had ever written within a relatively small amount of real world time.
Given millions of years to think, and the ability to open up an editor application to edit your own neural structures, do YOU think you would gradually become super-intelligent?
Did you read my post, or did you just make that comment to feel smart? If you read my post, I address that.
The starship isn't a robot, it's crewed by sentient entities.
Here's the roadmap :
1. We develop molecular manufacturing. That, simply put, is a small machine that can place a single atom at a time over and over again like a 3d printer. The machine is small enough that it itself can be produced by itself. Cells do this 24/7 with far more kludgey methods than our tech will use. (vacuum chamber + low temperature + supply of pure substrate + energy supply)
2. We then develop a machine that can cut a 3d object apart to determine it's structure, produced using meolecular manufacturing technology. Sort of a gigantic array of trillions of atomic force microscopes working in parallel.
3. We cut apart preserved and frozen human brains using this machine to get a true mapping of of human mind. With exact knowledge of how the brain's particles are connected, building artificial hardware to mimic it will be practical.
4. These artificial simulations of once living persons will run at thinking speeds constrained by the hardware, which will be probably millions of times faster than slow and inefficient human cells. If YOU could think for the apparent equivalent of a million years per earth year, you could probably learn every skill any human has in the first few millenia, then ???
This is called super-intelligence. Now, it is assumed that if someone had this kind of time and intelligence, they could turn it to revising themselves, creating an even smarter version of themselves, and so on. This explosion of increasing intelligence (til you hit some limit defined by physical laws, most likely) combined with exponentially increasing machinery is called the Singularity.
Anyways, with these kinds of resources, building starships would be child's play because you in fact would have practically infinite time, energy, and materials.
? what does that have to do with anything. Molecular manufacturing won't depend on molecular biology, for the reasons you just mentioned.
Well my assumption is that if, say, 1000 years from now, 100 separate entities have the resources to start on this kind of expansion. You know, different corporations, political entities, group minds, whatever.
Only one of them has to start it, and in another million years, the galaxy will be nothing but copies of that entity.
Basically, over the long run, if life can replicate exponentially it will do so, because the variants of life that fail or refuse to do so are quickly swept aside.
However, yes, this Fermi paradox hints that we ARE missing something huge. Maybe it really is a simulation, and we can escape or crash it. Etc.
Here's the best starship concept I have come up with, based upon the assumption that there are no major undiscovered principles of physics. (aka no way to cheat basic material science or travel faster than light or cheat conservation of momentum, and relativity holds)
Technology needed : with a form of nanotechnology known as "molecular manufacturing", you can produce anything of any size with control over every atomic bond. The only limits are materials and energy. You can also deconstruct any frozen object and determine it's molecular structure.
For departing Sol, use mass drivers. Either build a gigantic mass driver that can accelerate the entire starship in one go, or give the starship a mass driver that can "catch" pellets of iron fired from a smaller one you leave back at Sol.
Either way, you want to accelerate to the desired speed as rapidly as possible. This means hundreds or thousands of Gs of acceleration. The ship is mostly solid state at this point.
At 90% of the speed of the light, the ship cruises until it gets close enough to the destination star. At this point, it reconfigures the matter about the ship into a bussard ramscoop and uses this as a brake to slow down. This way, you use free floating interstellar particles as the reaction mass instead of mass carried aboard the ship. Antimatter is used as a power source, the antimatter being burned inside a power reactor inside the ship. (antimatter does not work very well as a direct source of propulsion)
The same nanotechnology used to construct the ship can also conduct perfect repairs and quickly respond to damage (given sufficient materials and energy). That way, during the many years of travel time when the ship is cruising through the space between the stars, you can repair damage from particle impacts. Also, the ship splits into dozens of pieces separated by thousands of kilometers, enough spacing so that if part of the ship collides with a large mass at 90% of the speed of light, the rest of the ship survives.
Once at the destination star and decelerated to rest relative to the star, the ship finds a small asteroid or comet near the star. It docks with it and uses the asteroid/comet as raw materials to begin expanding infrastructure. The star provides an energy source. With exponential growth, each asteroid or comet consumed increases the infrastructure (aka a swarm of various types of robots) available, allowing bigger objects to be consumed. Eventually, there would be enough equipment built to start tearing down moons for raw materials, and eventually even planets.
Once all the mass in the star system is consumed and converted into more robots, processors, etc more ships are built and sent off like seeds to more stars to continue the process.
In principle, the entire galaxy would be nothing but dyson spheres within a million years or so.
The ultimate Fermi paradox is why has this not happened yet. We are nearing the technological capability to do this. I think we will have molecular manufacturing within 100 years. Once we find a way to copy the complexity of human brains to far faster solid state circuitry, we will create super-intelligent beings who would have the ability to solve all the engineering problems within a matter of years. If the Singularity happens, then after that event this kind of expansion would be expected to start right away. Worst case scenario, within 1000 years this should start happening.
Even with all that time spent reloading the game when you die?
Ok, I get that this baby is running on beta hardware. But 16 hours? Can anyone here venture a guess as to why? No matter how sllloooowww the CPUs, or how inefficient the code, 16 hours isn't plausible.
So, it must refer to something the hardware is doing. Still, 16 hours? Thermodynamics is normally quicker than that for a machine that can fit on a truck. That's an awfully long time for it to be heating up or cooling down.
Any RF engineers here know a reason for this? My best guess is that components of this device rely on superconductivity, and require very slow peltier coolers to bring the operating temperature down to the range of operation. I've seen radios sold on ebay that use superconductors for parts of the RF elements.
Out of curiosity, did the Mac sales bring in enough revenue to be worth all the costs of doing the porting?
Oh, also, an automated car cannot become scared or panic. If a skid or spin happens, and the car has the sensors and software to detect it, it will immediately and rationally perform programmed actions to mitigate it. It will turn into the spin, etc.
What is REALLY needed is a law to mitigate liability risks for automated cars. Here's how a fair law might read :
All operators of automated vehicles are required to buy additional insurance. If someone is harmed by an automated vehicle malfunction, a panel is empowered to compensate the individual with a FIXED amount of money depending on the severity of the injury and or death. This is how vaccine injuries are handled : if a vaccine harms someone, they get a certain amount of injury depending on the risk.
Neutral, third party laboratories would be paid to examine the 'black boxes' from automated cars after a crash and present their findings to the panel.
The panel would be required by law to make a decision within a certain amount of time (~180 days sounds about right)
Advantages :
1. Lawyers eat up a large chunk of the money when litigation is allowed. This way, most of the money goes to the victims.
2. Everyone gets some compensation money instead of most getting nothing and a few hitting the jackpot
3. Faster decisions instead of lawsuits that take 5-10 years.
Disadvantages :
1. Panel can be unfair or biased and little can be done
2. The amounts of money seem low compared to jury awards for successful lawsuits. Lose a hand, it might be 100k not a million, etc.
3. Legislators who are lawyers have to write the legislation for this.
The reason to do this is the same reason we do vaccines, but it would save a LOT more lives. Automobiles kill far more people than the number who would die if we stopped most vaccinations. Automated cars will occasionally malfunction and kill someone. However, on the aggregate, the total deaths per passenger mile caused by automated vehicles will very likely be more than 10 times or more lower. Automated vehicles have short reaction delays, no need to take risks, ability to see in all directions they have sensors pointing at the same time, can predict a crash is about to occur and take mitigating actions (pre-firing the airbags, etc), activates the brakes quickly enough to avoid pileups, etc.
The thing is, an automated car will have software bugs, and will occasionally make mistakes. Maybe a good model will be as good a driver as the average driver on their best day. EXCEPT, an automated car's systems cannot become distracted, board, drunk, or fall asleep. I suspect that this advantage over millions of miles will prove to be huge. Sure, the average human might be smarter, but we don't give our best effort during every minute of the many hours we drive.
1. Requires no materials we don't already have
2. Would allow for continuous launches. This tube could be used every 15 minutes or so for another payload
3. Fairly massively spaceships could be launched this way
4. Once you get into LEO, getting around in space is relatively easy and cheap.
Downsides : the forces involved here are extreme. There's enormous magnetic fields, the whole structure is suspended in the air, it's over 1000 miles long, and depends on various complex pieces of tech to not rip itself apart. If the vacuum leaks or the plasma window fails or a magnet gets too much current, a chunk or even the whole damn launcher could spectacularly fail.
In addition, the estimated costs have got to be a factor of 10 too optimistic. 60 billion dollars? For something constructed of tens of thousands of miles of superconducting cable and a structure made to aerospace engineering tolerances that is 1000 miles long? Even 600 billion sounds optimistic for something that large.
So, after making some of the best sci-fi action movies ever filmed, James Cameron kicks back with some dives to the bottom of the ocean.
You know what the best part of it is? Nearly every dive he has done has been paid for by others. After filming titanic, he did a bunch of dives as "research" for his next movie, Avatar. I must have missed the underwater scenes in that film...
Anyways, the beauty of doing it this way is :
1. He gets to charge the investors in the movie for the costs of the underwater dives AND still receive his full salary
2. Since research is a business expense, neither JC nor the movie studio pay any income taxes on the money used to fund this hobby
3. Since he's bringing an IMAX camera along for the current endeavor, WE'RE collectively going to pay the bills for the expedition!
Anyways, stuff like this is how rich people get even richer. I mean sure he could probably write a check for the millions of dollars these trips costs, but that's not how rich people roll...
With all that said, I don't see anything wrong with his actions. Mr. Cameron didn't write the tax laws, and unlikely many wealthy people, he started from nothing, and he created something to earn his wealth. It's become fashionable to criticize Avatar, but it was one of the best looking movies ever filmed, and had a solid story.
My point is, the authorities are not going to negotiate if they think their chance of destroying the nuke is higher than the bomber's chance of setting it off is. Well, mostly, big institutions and/or authority figures like to minimize risk they can be blamed for. Since doing something to disable the nuke is rolling the dice, they would avoid rolling the die unless they felt there were no other options.
Each and every advance in RF technology, the final signal becomes more and more chaotic. The entropy rises and rises as we cram more and more data into the available frequencies.
Also, the broadcasts have to become more directional and they use less energy.
Anyways, it's pretty easy to extrapolate on this trend. What will the RF emissions from earth look like in 1000 years, when we've developed radio technology to the physical limits? I suspect that those signals will be completely indistinguishable from noise from the reference of an observer located at another star.
The catch is, what happens if the astronauts become incapacitated or are forced to abandon the station without flipping a switch to put the station on to remote ground control? More than likely, there is a way for the station on the ground to remotely broadcast commands to control the crucial systems on the station. (the power systems and all of the rocket engines, as well as perhaps cooling and life support)
That would not end peacefully. The counter to a backpack nuke would be to hit the location where the nuke is with a large enough explosion to disable the nuke, before it can go off.